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THE A. E. F. 




GENERAL PERSHING 

COMMANDING THE A. E. F. 



THE A. E. F. 

WITH GENERAL PERSHING 
AND THE AMERICAN FORCES 



BY 

HEYWOOD BROUN 




D. APPLETON AND COMPANY 

NEW YORK LONDON 

1918 



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COPTBIOHT. 1918, BT 

T>. APPLETON AND COMPANY 



APR 18 1918 



Printed in the United States of America, 



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seCLA492968 



TO 

RUTH HALE 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

I. The Big Pond 1 

II. The a. E. F 11 

III. Lafayette, Nous Voila .... 25 

IV. The Franco-American Honeymoon . 36 
V. Within Sound of the Guns ... 56 

VI. Sunny Prance * 74 

VII. Pershing 92 

VIII. Men with Medals 102 

IX. Letters Home 115 

X. Marines 125 

XI. Field Pieces and Big Guns . . . 136 

XII. Our Aviators and a Few Others . 147 

XIII. Hospitals and Engineers .... 164 

XIV. We Visit the French Army . . . 177 
XV. Verdun 192 

XVI. We Visit thb British Army . . . 200 

XVII. Back from Prison ^ 221 

XVIII. Finishing Touches 227 

XIX. The American Army Marches to the 

Trenches 250 

XX. Trench Life 260 

XXL The Veterans Return 281 



Some of the material in this book is reprinted 
through the courtesy of the New York Tribune, 



THE A. E. R 

CHAPTER I 

THE BIG POND 

"VoiLA UN sousMARiN," Said a sailor, as he 
stuck his head through the doorway of the 
smoking room. The man with aces and eights 
dropped, but the player across the table had 
three sevens, and he waited for a translation. 
It came from the little gun on the afterdeck. 
The gun said "Bang!" and in a few seconds 
it repeated "Bang!" I heard the second shot 
from my stateroom, but before I had adjusted 
my lifebelt the gun fired at the submarine once 
more. 

A cheer followed this shot. No Yale eleven, 
or even Harvard for that matter, ever heard 
such a cheer. It was as if the shout for the 
first touchdown and for the last one and for 
all the field goals and long gains had been 

1 



THE A. E. F. 

thrown into one. There was something in the 
cheer, too, of a long drawn "ho-old 'em." 

I looked out the porthole and asked an am- 
bulance man: "Did we get her then?" 

"No, but we almost did," he answered. 
"There she is," he added. "That's the peri- 
scope." 

Following the direction of his finger I found 
a stray beanpole thrust somewhat carelessly 
into the ocean. It came out of a wave top with 
a rakish tilt. Probably ours was the angle, 
for the steamer was cutting the ocean into jig- 
saw sections as we careened away for dear life, 
now with a zig and then with a zag, seeking 
safety in drunken flight. When I reached the 
deck, steamer and passengers seemed to be 
doing as well as could be expected, and even 
better. 

The periscope was falling astern, and the 
three hundred passengers, mostly ambulance 
drivers and Red Cross nurses, were lined along 
the rail, rooting. Some of the girls stood on 
top of the rail and others climbed up to the 
lifeboats, which were as good as a row of 
boxes. It was distinctly a home team crowd. 

2 



THE BIG POND 

Nobody cheered for the submarine. The only 
passenger who showed fright was a chap who 
rushed up and down the deck loudly shouting: 
"Don't get excited." 

"Give 'em hell," said a home town fan and 
shook his fist in the direction of the submarine. 
The gunner fired his fourth shot and this time 
he was far short in his calculation. 

"It's a question of whether we get her first 
or she gets us, isn't it?" asked an old lady in 
about the tone she would have used in ask- 
ing a popular lecturer whether or not he 
thought Hamlet was really mad. Such neu- 
trality was beyond me. I couldn't help ex- 
pressing a fervent hope that the contest would 
be won by our steamer. It was the bulliest sort 
of a game, and a pleasant afternoon, too, but 
one passenger was no more than mildly inter- 
ested. W. K. Vanderbilt did not put on a life 
preserver nor did he leave his deck chair. He 
sat up just a bit and watched the whole af- 
fair tolerantly. After all the submarine cap- 
tain was a stranger to him. 

Our fifth and final shot was the best. It hit 
the periscope or thereabouts. The shell did not 

3 



THE A. E. F. 

rebound and there was a patch of oil on the 
surface of the water. The beanpole disap- 
peared. The captain left the bridge and went 
to the smoking room. He called for cognac. 

"II est mort," said he, with a sweep of his 
right hand. 

*'He says we sunk her," explained the man 
who spoke French. 

The captain said the submarine had fired 
one torpedo and had missed the steamer by 
about ninety feet. The U-boat captain must 
have taken his eye off the boat, or sliced or 
committed some technical blunder or other, 
for he missed an easy shot. Even German ef- 
ficiency cannot eradicate the blessed amateur. 
May his thumbs never grow less ! 

We looked at the chart and found that our 
ship was more than seven hundred miles from 
the nearest land. It seemed a lonely ocean. 

One man came through the crisis with com- 
plete triumph. As soon as the submarine was 
sighted, the smoking room steward locked the 
cigar chest and the wine closet. Not until 
then did he go below for his lifebelt. 

Reviewing my own emotions, I found that I 
4 



THE BIG POND 

had not been frightened quite as badly as I ex- 
pected. The submarine didn't begin to scare 
me as much as the first act of "The Thirteenth 
Chair," but still I could hardly lay claim to 
calm, for I had not spoken one of the appro- 
priate speeches which came to my mind after 
the attack. The only thing to which I could 
point with pride was the fact that before put- 
ting on my lifebelt I paused to open a box of 
candy, and went on deck to face destruction, 
or what not, with a caramel between my teeth. 
But before the hour was up I was sunk in- 
deed. 

It was submarine this and sousmarin that 
in the smoking room. The U-boats lurked in 
every corner. One man had seen two and at 
the next table was a chap who had seen three. 
There was the fellow who had sighted the peri- 
scope first of all, the man who had seen the 
wake of the torpedo, and the littlest ambulance 
driver who had sighted the submarine through 
the bathroom window while immersed in the 
tub. He was the man who had started for 
the deck with nothing more about him than a 
lifebelt and had been turned back. 

5 



THE A. E. F. 

"I wonder," said a passenger, "whether 
those submarines have wireless? Do you sup- 
pose now that boat could send messages on 
ahead and ask other U-boats to look after us?" 
And just then the gun on the forward deck 
went "Bang." 

It was the meanest and most inappropriate 
sound I ever heard. It was an anti-climax of 
the most vicious sort. It was bad form, bad 
art, bad everything. I felt a little sick, and 
one of the contributing emotions was a sort 
of fearfully poignant boredom. I tried to re- 
member just what the law of averages was and 
to compute as rapidly as possible the chances 
of the vessel to complete two more days of 
travel if attacked by a submarine every hour. 

"The ocean is full of the damn things," said 
the man at the next table petulantly. 

This time the thing was a black object not 
more than fifty yards away. The captain sig- 
naled the gunner not to fire again and he let 
it be known that this was nothing but a bar- 
rel. Later it was rumored that it was a mine, 
but then there were all sorts of rumors dur- 
ing those last two days when we ran along 

6 



THE BIG POND 

with lifeboats swung out. There was much 
talk of a convoy, but none appeared. 

Many passengers slept on deck and some 
went to meals with their lifebelts on. Every- 
body jumped when a plate was dropped and 
there was always the possibility of starting a 
panic by slamming a door. And so we cheered 
when the steamer came to the mouth of the 
river which leads to Bordeaux. We cheered 
for France from friendship. We cheered from 
surprise and joy when the American flag went 
up to the top of a high mast and we cheered 
a little from sheer relief because we had left 
the sea and the U-boats behind us. 

They had been with us not a little from the 
beginning. Even on the first day out from 
New York the ship ran with all lights out and 
portholes shielded. Later passengers were for- 
bidden to smoke on deck at night and once 
there was a lifeboat drill of a sort, but the boats 
were not swung out in the davits until after 
we met the submarine. 

Early in the voyage an old lady complained 
to the purser because a young man in the music 

7 



THE A. E. F. 

room insisted on playing the Dead March from 
"Saul." There was more cheerful music. The 
ambulance drivers saw to that. We had an 
Amherst unit and one from Leland Stanford 
and the boys were nineteen or thereabouts. It 
is well enough to say that all the romance has 
gone out of modem war, but you can t con- 
vince a nineteen-year-older of that when he has 
his first khaki on his back and his first anti- 
typhoid inoculation in his arm. They boasted 
of these billion germs and they swaggered and 
played banjos and sang songs. Mostly they 
sang at night on the pitch black upper deck. 
The littlest ambulance driver had a nice tenor 
voice and on still nights he did not care what 
submarine commander knew that he "learned 
about women from her." He and his com- 
panions rocked the stars with "She knifed me 
one night." Daytimes they studied French 
from the ground up. It was the second day 
out that I heard a voice from just outside my 
porthole inquire "E-S-T — what's that and how 
do you say it?" Later on the littlest ambu- 
lance driver had made marked progress and 

8 



THE BIG POND 

was explaining "Mon oncle a une bonne fille, 
mais mon pere est riche." 

Romance was not hard to find on the vessel. 
The slow waiter who limped had been wounded 
at the Marne, and the little fat stewardess had 
spent twenty-two days aboard the German 
raider Eitel Friedrich. There were French 
soldiers in the steerage and one of them had 
the Croix de Guerre with four palms. He 
had been wounded three times. 

But when the ship came up the river the 
littlest ambulance driver — the one who knew 
"est" and women — summed things up and 
decided that he was glad to be an American. 
He looked around the deck at the Red Cross 
nurses and others who had stood along the rail 
and cheered in the submarine fight, and he 
said: 

"I never would have thought it of 'em. It's 
kinda nice to know American women have 
got so much nerve." 

The littlest ambulance driver drew himself 
up to his full five feet four and brushed his 
new uniform once again. 

"Yes, sir," he said, "we men have certainly 
9 



THE A. E. F. 



got to hand it to the girls on this boat." And 
as he went down the gangplank he was hum- 
ming: "And I learned about women from 
her." 



CHAPTER II 

THE A. E. F. 

The dawn was gray and so was the ship, but 
the eye picked her out of the mist because of 
two broad yellow stripes which ran the whole 
length of the upper decks. As the ship 
warped into the pier the stripes of yellow 
became so many layers of men in khaki, each 
motionless and each gazing toward the land. 

"Say," cried a voice across the diminishing 
strip of water, "what place is this anyhow?" 
The reply came back from newspapermen 
whose only companions on the pier were two 
French soldiers and a little group of Ger- 
man prisoners. 

"Well," said the voice from the ship, "this 
ought to be better than the Texas border." 

The American regulars had come to 
France. 

The two French soldiers looked at the men 
11 



THE A. E. F. 

on the transport and cheered, flinging their 
caps in the air. The Germans just looked. 
They were engaged in moving rails and after 
lifting one they would pause and gaze into 
space for many minutes until the guards told 
them to get to work again. But now the 
guards were so interested that the Germans 
prolonged the rest interval and stared at the 
ship. News that ships were in was carried 
through the town and people came running 
to the pier. There were women and children 
and old men and a few soldiers. 

Nobody had known the Americans were 
coming. Even the mayor was surprised and 
had to run home to get his red sash and his 
high hat. Children on the way to school did 
not go further than the quay, for back of the 
ship, creeping into the slip, were other ships 
with troops and torpedo boat destroyers and a 
cruiser. 

Just before the gangplank was lowered the 
band on the first transport played "The Star 
Spangled Banner." The men on the ship 
stood at attention. The crowds on shore only 
watched. They did not know our national 

12 



THE A. E. F. 

anthem yet. Next the band played "The 
Marseillaise," and the hats of the crowd came 
off. As the last note died away one of the 
Americans relaxed from attention and leaned 
over the rail toward a small group of news- 
papermen from America. 

"Do they allow- enlisted men to drink in 
the saloons in this town?" he asked. 

Somebody else wanted to know, "Is there 
any place in town where a fellow can get a 
piece of pie?" A sailor was anxious to rent a 
bicycle or a horse and "ride somewhere." 
Later the universal question became, "Don't 
any of these people speak American?" 

The men were hustled off the ship and 
marched into the long street which runs paral- 
lel with the docks. They passed within a few 
feet of the Germans. There was less than 
the length of a bayonet between them but the 
doughboys did credit to their brief training. 
They kept their eyes straight ahead. 

"How do they look?" one of the newspaper- 
men asked a German sergeant in the group of 
prisoners. 

"Oh, they look all right," he said profes- 
13 



THE A. E. F. 

sionally, "but you can't tell yet. I'd want to 
see them in action first." 

"They don't lift their knees high enough," 
he added and grinned at his little joke. 

A French soldier came up then and ex- 
postulated. He said that we must not talk to 
the Germans and set his prisoners back to 
their task of lifting rails. There were guards 
at both ends of the street, but scores of chil- 
dren slipped by them and began to talk to the 
soldiers. There were hardly half a dozen 
men in the first regiment who understood 
French. Veterans of the Mexican border 
tried a little bad Spanish and when that didn't 
work they fell back to signs. The French 
made an effort to meet the visitors half way. 
I saw a boy extend his reader to a soldier and 
explain that a fearfully homely picture which 
looked like a caterpillar was a "chenille." The 
boy added that the chenille was so ugly that 
it was without doubt German and no good. 
Children also pointed out familiar objects in 
the book such as "Chats" and "Chiens," but 
as one soldier said: "I don't care about those 

14 



THE A. E, F. 

things, sonny: haven't you got a roast chicken 
or an apple pie in that book?" 

Some officers had tried to teach their men 
a little French on the trip across, but not 
much seemed to stick. The men were not over 
curious as to this strange language. One old 
sergeant went to his lieutenant and said: 
"You know, sir, I've served in China and the 
Philippines and Cuba. I've been up against 
this foreign language proposition before and 
I know just what I need. If you'll write 
down a few words for me and tell me how 
they're pronounced I won't have to bother 
you any more. I want *Give me a plate of 
ham and eggs. How much? What's your 
name?' and 'Do you love me, kid?' " 

The vocabulary of the officers did not seem 
very much more extensive than that of the 
men. While the troops were disembarking 
officers were striving to get supplies started 
for the camp several miles outside the city. 
All the American motor trucks had been 
shipped on the slowest steamer of the convoy 
but the French came to our aid. "I have just 
one order," said the French officer, who met 

15 



THE A. E. F. 

the first unit of the American Expeditionary 
Army, "there is no American and no French 
now. There is only ours." 

Although the officer was kind enough to 
make ownership of all available motor trucks 
common, he could not do as much for the 
language of the poilus who drove them. I 
found the American motor truck chief hope- 
lessly entangled. 

"Have you enough gasoline to go to the 
camp and back?" he inquired of the driver of 
the first camion to be loaded. The French- 
man shrugged his shoulders to indicate that 
he did not comprehend. The officer smiled 
tolerantly and spoke with gentle firmness as 
if to a wayward child. "Have you enough 
gasoline?" he said. Again the Frenchman's 
shoulders went up. "Have you enough gaso- 
line?" repeated the officer, only this time he 
spoke loudly and fiercely as if talking to his 
wife. Even yet the Frenchman did not un- 
derstand. Inspiration came to the American 
officer. Suddenly he gesticulated with both 
hands and began to imitate George Beban as 
the French waiter in one of the old Weber 

16 



THE A. E. F. 

and Fields shows. " 'Ave you enough of ze 
gaz-o-leene ?" he piped mincingly. Then an 
interpreter came. 

After several companies had disembarked 
the march to camp began, up the main street 
and along the fine shore road which skirts the 
bay. The band struck up "Stars and Stripes 
Forever" and away they went. They did not 
march well, these half green companies who 
had rolled about the seas so long, but they 
held the eyes of all and the hearts of some. 
They glorified even cheap tunes such as "If 
You Don't Like Your Uncle Sammy Go 
Back to Your Home Across the Sea," and 
Sousa seemed a very master of fire when the 
men paraded to his marches. These Amer- 
ican units did not give the impression of com- 
pactness which one gets from Frenchmen on 
the march. The longer stride gives the dough- 
boy an uneven gait. He looks like a man 
walking across a plowed field and yet you can- 
not miss a sense of power. You feel that he 
will get there even if his goal is the red sun 
itself at the back of the hills. 

There was no long drawn cheer from the 
17 



THE A. E. F. 

people who lined the streets to see the Amer- 
icans pass. Even crowds in Paris do not cheer 
like that. Instead individuals called out 
phrases of greeting and there was much hand- 
clapping. Although mixed in point of serv- 
ice the men ran to type as far as build went. 
They amazed the French by their height, al- 
though some of the organizations which fol- 
lowed the first division are better physically. 
Of course these American troops are actually 
taller than the French and in addition they 
are thin enough to accentuate their height. It 
was easy to pick out the youngsters, most of 
whom found their packs a little heavy. They 
would stand up straighter though when an old 
sergeant moved alongside and growled a word 
or two. It was easy to see that these sergeants 
were of the old army. They were all lank 
men, boiled red from within and without. 
They had put deserts and jungles under foot 
and no distance would seem impossible for 
them along the good roads of France. 

As ship after ship came in more troops 
marched to camp. The streets were filled 
with the clatter of the big boots of doughboys 

18 



THE A. E. F. 

throughout the morning and well into the 
afternoon. There were American army mules, 
too, and although the natives had seen the 
animal before in French service, he attracted 
no end of attention. In his own particular 
army the mule seems more picturesque. He 
has never learned French. It seems to break 
his spirit, but he pranced and kicked and 
played the very devil under the stimulus of 
the loud endearments of the American mule 
drivers. 

The French were also interested in a com- 
pany of American negroes specially re- 
cruited for stevedore service. The negroes 
had been outfitted with old cavalry overcoats 
of a period shortly after the Civil War. They 
were blue coats with gold buttons and the lin- 
ing was a tasteful but hardly somber shade of 
crimson. Nor were the negroes without pic- 
turesque qualities even when they had shed 
their coats and gone to work. Their work- 
ing shirts of white were inked all over with 
pious sentences calculated to last through the 
submarine zone, but piety was mixed. One 
big negro, for instance, had written upon 

19 



THE A. E. F. 

his shirt: "The Lord is my shepherd," but un- 
derneath he had drawn a large starfish for 
luck. A few daring ones had ornamented 
themselves with skulls and crosshones. To the 
negroes fell the bitterest disappointment of 
the American landing in France. Two Savan- 
nah stevedores caught sight of a black soldier 
in the French uniform and rushed up to ex- 
change greetings. The Senegalese shrugged 
his shoulders and turned away from the flood 
of English. 

"That," said one of the American darkies, 
"is the most ignorantest and stuck up nigger 
I ever did see." They were not yet ready to 
believe that the negro race had let itself in for 
the amazing complications of a foreign lan- 
guage. 

Later in the day the town was full of the 
eddies which occur when two languages meet 
head on, for almost all the soldiers and sailors 
received leave to come to town. They wanted 
beer and champagne and cognac, chocolate, 
cake, crackers, pears, apples, cherries, picture 
postcards, sardines, rings, cigarettes, and 
books of French and English phrases. The 

20 



THE A. E. F. 

phrase books were usually an afterthought, so 
commerce was conducted with difficulty. A 
few of the shopkeepers equipped themselves 
with dictionaries and painstakingly worked 
out the proper reply for each customer. Signs 
were much more effective and when it came 
to purchase, the sailor or soldier simply held 
out a handful of American money and the 
storekeeper took a little. To the credit of the 
shopkeepers of the nameless port, let it be 
said that they seemed in every case to take no 
more than an approximation of the right 
amount. Fortunately the late unpleasantness 
at Babel was not absolutely thoroughgoing 
and there are words in French which offer no 
great difficulty to the American. The entente 
cordiale is furthered by words such as "choco- 
lat," "sandwich," "biere" and "bifstek." The 
difficulties of *Vin" are not insurmountable 
either. 

"A funny people," was the comment of one 
doughboy, "when I ask for 'sardines' I get 
'em all right, but when I say 'cheese' or 
'canned peaches' I don't get anything." 

Another complained, "I don't understand 
21 



THE A. E. F. 

these people at all. They spell some of their 
words all right, but they haven't got the sense 
to say 'em that way." He could see no rea- 
son why "vin" should sound like "van." 

Another objection of the invading army was 
that the townsfolk demanded whole sentences 
of French. Mixtures seemed incomprehen- 
sible to them and the officer who kept crying 
out, "Madame, where are my oeufs?" got no 
satisfaction whatever. 

Late in the afternoon phrase books began 
to appear, but they did not help a great deal 
because by the time the right phrase had been 
found some fellow who used only sign lan- 
guage had slipped in ahead of the student. 
Then, too, some of the books seemed hardly 
adapted for present conditions. One officer 
was distinctly annoyed because the first sen- 
tence he found in a chapter headed war terms 
was, "Where is the grand stand?" But the 
book which seemed to fall furthest short of 
promise was a pamphlet entitled, "Just the 
French You Want to Know." 

"Look at this," said an indignant owner. 
"Le travail assure la sante et la bien-etre, il 

22 



THE A. E. F. 

eleve et fortifie Tame, il adoucit les souf- 
frances, chasse Tennui, et plaisir sans pareil, 
il est encore le sel des autres plaisirs. Go on 
with it. Look at what all that means — 'Work 
assures health and well being, it elevates and 
fortifies the soul, drives away ennui, alleviates 
suffering, and, a pleasure without an equal, it 
is still the salt of all other pleasures' — what 
do you think of that? Just the French you 
want to know! I don't want to address the 
graduating class, I want to tell a barber to 
leave it long on top, but trim it pretty close 
around the edges." 

The happy purchaser of the book did not 
throw it away, however, until he turned to the 
chapter headed "At the Tailor's" and found 
that the first sentence set down in French 
meant, *'The bodice is too tight in front, and 
it is uncomfortable under the arms. It is a 
little too low-necked, and the sleeves are not 
wide enough." 

Sundown sent most of the soldiers scurry- 
ing back to camp, but the port lacked no life 
that night, for sailors came ashore in increas- 
ing numbers and American officers weire 

23 



THE A. E. F. 

everywhere. The two hotels — the Grand and 
the Grand Hotel des Messageries, known to 
the army as the Grand and Miserable Hotel 
— were thronged. Generals and Admirals 
rushed about to conferences and in the middle 
of all the confusion a young second lieutenant 
sat at the piano in the parlor of the Grand 
and played Schumann's "Warum" over and 
over again as if his heart would break for 
homesickness. The sailors and a few soldiers 
who seemed to have business in the town had 
no trouble in making themselves at home. 

"Mademoiselle, donnez moi un baiser, s'il 
vous plait," said one of the apt pupils to the 
pretty barmaid at the Cafe du Centre. 

But she said: "Mais non." 

Crowds began to collect just off the main 
street. I hurried over to one group of sailors, 
convinced that something important was going 
on, since French soldiers and civilians stood 
about six deep. History was being made in- 
deed. For the first time "craps" was being 
played on French soil. 



CHAPTER III 

LAFAYETTE, NOUS VOILA 

The navy was the first to take Paris. While 
the doughboys were still at the port crowding 
themselves into camp, lucky sailors were on 
their way to let the French capital see the 
American uniform. I came up on the night 
train with a crowd of them. Their pockets 
bulged with money, tins of salmon, ham and 
truffled chicken. They had chocolate in their 
hats and boxes of fancy crackers under their 
arms, while cigars and cigarettes poked out of 
their blouses. They would have nothing to 
do with French tobacco, but favored a popu- 
lar American brand which sells for a quarter 
in New York and twice as much over here. 
One almost expected each sailor to produce a 
roast turkey or a pheasant from up his sleeve 
at meal time, but it was pretty much all meal 
time for these men who were making their 

25 



THE A. E. F. 

shore leave an intensive affair. One was a 
very iiew sailor and he was rejoicing to find 
land under his feet again. 

"Oh, boy!" he said, when I asked him about 
his ship, "that old tub had two more move- 
ments than a hula dancer." 

The little group in my compartment was 
sampling some champagne which hospitable 
folk at the port had given them. It was not 
real champagne, to be sure, but a cheaper 
white wine with twice as many bubbles and at 
least as much noise. It sufficed very well, 
since it was ostentation rather than thirst 
which spurred the sailors on and they spread 
their hospitality throughout the train. A few 
French soldiers headed back for the trenches 
were the traveling companions of the Amer- 
icans. The poilus were decidedly friendly but 
somewhat amazed at the big men who made 
so much noise with their jokes and their songs. 
Of course the French were called upon to 
sample the various tinned and bottled goods 
which the sailors were carrying. It was "have 
a swig of this. Froggy" or "get yourself 
around that, Frenchy." The Americans were 

26 



LAFAYETTE, NOUS VOILA 

still just a bit condescending to their brothers 
in arms. They had not yet seen them in action. 
Of course there was much comparison of equip- 
ment and the sailors all tried on the trench 
helmets of the French and found them too 
small. The entente grew and presently there 
was an allied concert. The sailors sang, 
"What a Wonderful Mother You'd Make," 
and the French replied with the Verdun song, 
*'Ils Ne Passeront Pas," and later with 
"Madelon." 

I heard that song many times afterwards 
and it always brings to mind a picture of 
dusty French soldiers marching with their 
short, quick, eager stride. They are always 
dusty. All summer long they wear big over- 
coats which come below the knee. Dust set- 
tles and multiplies and if you see a French 
regiment marching in the spring rainy season, 
it will still be dusty. Perhaps their souls are 
a little dusty now, but it is French dust. And 
as they march they sing as the men sang to the 
newly arrived Americans in the train that 
night : 

27 



THE A. E. F. 

For all the soldiers, on their holidays, 

There is a place, just tucked in by the woods, 

A house with ivy growing on the walls — 

A cabaret — "Aux Toulourous" — the goods! 

The girl who serves is young and sweet as love, 

She's light as any butterfly in Spring, 

Her eyes have got a sparkle like her wine. 

We call her Madelon — it's got a swing! 

The soldiers' girl! She leads us all a dance! 

She's only Madelon, but she's Romance! 

When Madelon comes out to serve us drinks, 
We always know she's coming by her song! 
And every man, he tells his little tale. 
And Madelon, she listens all day long. 
Our Madelon is never too severe — 
A kiss or two is nothing much to her — 
She laughs us up to love and life and God — 
Madelon ! Madelon ! Madelon ! 

We all have girls for keeps that wait at home 

Who'll marry us when fighting time is done; 

But they are far away — too far to tell 

What happens in these days of cut-and-run. 

We sigh away such days as best we can, 

And pray for time to bring us nearer home. 

But tales like ours won't wait till then to tell — 

We have to run and boast to Madelon. 

We steal a kiss — she takes it all in play; 

We dream she is that other — far away. 

28 



LAFAYETTE, NOUS VOILA 

A corp'ral with a feather in his cap 

Went courting Madelon one summer's day, 

And, mad with love, he swore she was superb, 

And he would wed her any day she'd say. 

But Madelon was not for any such — 

She danced away and laughed: "My stars above! 

Why, how could I consent to marry you. 

When I have my whole regiment to love? 

I could not choose just one and leave the rest. 

I am the soldiers' girl — I like that best!" 

When Madelon comes out to serve us drinks, 
We always know she's coming by her song! 
And every man, he tells his little tale. 
And Madelon, she listens all day long. 
Our Madelon is never too severe — 
A kiss or two is nothing much to her — 
She laughs us up to love and life and God — 
Madelon ! Madelon ! Madelon ! 

When the train came into Paris early the 
next morning the sailors were singing the 
chorus with the poilus. They parted company 
at the quai d'Orsay. The soldiers went to the 
front; the sailors turned to Paris. It was a 
Paris such as no one had ever seen before. 
The "banniere etoilee" was everywhere. We 
call it the Stars and Stripes. Little flags were 
stuck rakishly behind the ears of disreputable 

29 



THE A. E. F. 

Parisian cab horses; bigger flags were in the 
windows of the shops and on top of buildings, 
but the biggest American flag of all hung on 
the Strassburg monument which shed its 
mourning when the war began. 

Two days later all the flags were flutter- 
ing, for on the morning of the third of July 
the doughboys came to Paris. It made no 
difl'erence that they were only a battalion. 
When the French saw them they thought of 
armies and of new armies, for these were the 
first soldiers in many months who smiled as 
they marched. The train was late, but the 
crowd waited outside the Gare d'Austerlitz 
for more than two hours. French Red Cross 
nurses were waiting at the station, and the 
doughboys had their first experience with 
French rations, for they began the long day 
with "petit dejeuner." Men brought up on 
ham and eggs and flapjacks and oatmeal and 
even breakfast pie, found war bread and cof- 
fee a scant repast, but the ration proved more 
popular than was expected when it was found 
that the coffee was charged with cognac. 
It was a stronger stimulant, though, which 

30 



LAFAYETTE, NOUS VOILA 

sent the men up on the tips of their toes 
as they swung down the street covering thirty- 
two inches with each stride. For the first time 
they heard the roar of a crowd. It was not 
the steady roar such as comes from American 
throats. It was split up into "Vive les Etats 
Unis!" and "Vive FAmerique!" with an occa- 
sional "Vive le President Wilson!" This ap- 
pearance was only a dress rehearsal and the 
troops were hurried through little frequented 
streets to a barracks to await the morning of 
the Fourth. 

Paris began the great day by waking Persh- 
ing with music. The band of the republican 
guard was at the gate of his house a little 
after eight o'clock. The rest of Paris seemed 
to have had no trouble in arousing itself with- 
out music, for already several hundred thou- 
sand persons were crowded about the Gen- 
eral's hotel. First there were trumpets; then 
brasses blared and drums rumbled. The Gen- 
eral proved himself a light sleeper and a quick 
dresser. Before the last note of the fanfare 
died away he was at the window and bowing 
to the crowd. This time there was a solid 



THE A. E. F. 

roar, for everybody shouted "Vive Pershing." 
The band cut through the din. There were a 
few strange variations and uncertainties in 
the tune, but it was unmistakably "The Star 
Spangled Banner." Only a handful in the 
crowd knew the American National anthem, 
but they shouted ''Chapeau, chapeau" so hard 
that everybody took up the cry and took oJBP 
his hat. There was a fine indefinite noisy 
roar which would have done credit to a dou- 
ble header crowd at the Polo Grounds when 
Pershing left his hotel for the "Invalides," 
where the march of the Americans was to be- 
gin. It was pleasant to observe at that mo- 
ment that our commander has as straight a 
back as any man in the allied armies can 
boast. 

At least four hundred thousand people were 
crowded around the "Invalides." They had 
plenty of chance to shout. They were able to 
keep their enthusiasm within bounds when 
first Poincare appeared and then Painleve. 
The next celebrity was Papa JofFre and hats 
went into the air. There was an interval of 
waiting then and a bit of a riot. An old man 

32 



LAFAYETTE, NOUS VOILA 

who found the elbows of his neighbors dis- 
agreeable, exclaimed: "Oh, let me have peace!" 
Somebody who heard the word "peace" 
shouted: "He's a pacifist," and people near 
at hand began to hit at him. He was saved 
by the coming of the American soldiers. 
"Vive les Teddies," shouted the crowd and 
forgot the old man. 

The crowd made way for the Americans as 
they marched toward the "Invalides" and into 
the court yard where the trophies won from 
the Germans are displayed. "You will bring 
more from the Boche," shouted a Frenchman. 
French and American flags floated above the 
guns and aeroplanes and minenwerfers. Dur- 
ing the short ceremony the American soldiers 
looked about curiously at the trophies and up 
at the dome above the tomb of Napoleon. 
Many knew him by reputation and some had 
heard that he was buried there. 

After a short ceremony the Americans 
marched out of the "Invalides" and toward 
the Picpus cemetery. The crowds had in- 
creased. It was hard marching now. French 
children ran in between the legs of the sol- 

33 



THE A. E. F. 

diers. French soldiers and civilians crowded 
in upon them. It was impossible to keep 
ranks. Now the men in khaki were just a lit- 
tle brown stream twisting and turning in an 
effort to get onward. People threw roses at 
the soldiers and they stuffed them into their 
hats and in the gun barrels. It was reported 
from several sources that one or two soldiers 
who were forced out of ranks were kissed, but 
no one would admit it afterwards. The 
youngsters in the ranks tried their best to keep 
a military countenance. They endeavored to 
achieve an expression which should be polite 
but firm, an air of having been through the 
same experience many times before. Only 
one or two old sergeants succeeded. The rest 
blushed under the cheers and entangling inter- 
est of the crowd and they could not keep the 
grins away when people shouted "Vive les 
Teddies" or threw roses at them. On that 
morning it was great to be young and a 
doughboy. 

On and on they went past high walls and 
gardens to the edge of the city to a cemetery. 
There were speeches here and they were 

34 



LAFAYETTE, NOUS VOILA 

mostly French. Ribot spoke and Painleve 
and Pershing. His was English and he said: 
"I hope, and I would like to say it that here 
on the soil of France and in the school of the 
French heroes, our American soldiers may 
learn to battle and to vanquish for the liberty 
of the world." 

But the speech which left the deepest im- 
pression was the shortest of all. Colonel 
Stanton stood before the tomb of Lafayette 
and made a quick, sharp gesture which was 
broad enough to include the youngsters from 
Alabama and Texas and Massachusetts and 
Ohio and the rest. "Lafayette, we're here!' 
he said. 



CHAPTER IV 

THE FRANCO-AMERICAN HONEYMOON 

The day after the Americans marched in 
Paris one of the French newspapers referred 
to the doughboys as "Roman Caesars clad in 
khaki." The city set itself to liking the sol- 
diers and everything American and succeeded 
admirably. Even the taxicab drivers refrained 
from overcharging Americans very much. 
School children studied the history of America 
and "The Star Spangled Banner." There 
were pictures of President Wilson and Gen- 
eral Pershing in many shops and some had 
framed translations of the President's mes- 
sage to Congress. In fact, so eager were the 
French to take America to their hearts that 
they even made desperate efforts to acquire a 
working knowledge of baseball. Excelsior^ 
an illustrated French daily, carried an action 
picture taken during a game played between 

36 



FRANCO-AMERICAN HONEYMOON 

American ambulance drivers just outside of 
Paris. The picture was entitled: "A player 
goes to catch the ball, which has been missed 
by the catcher," and underneath ran the fol- 
lowing explanation: "We have given in our 
number of yesterday the rules of baseball, the 
American national game, of which a game, 
which is perhaps the first ever played in 
France, took place yesterday at Colombes be- 
tween the soldiers of the American ambu- 
lances. Here is an aspect of the game. The 
pitcher, or thrower of balls, whom one sees in 
the distance, has sent the ball. The catcher, 
or 'attrapeur,' who should restrike the ball 
with his wooden club, has missed it, and a 
player placed behind him has seized it in its 
flight." 

The next day Ulntransigeant undertook 
the even more hazardous task of explaining 
American baseball slang. During the parade 
on the Fourth of July some Americans had 
greeted the doughboys with shouts of 
**ataboy." A French journalist heard and 
was puzzled. He returned to his office and 
looked in English dictionaries and various 

37 



THE A. E. F. 

works of reference without enlightenment. 
Several English friends were unable to help 
him and an American who had lived in Paris 
for thirty years was equally at sea. But the 
reporter worked it out all by himself and the 
next day he wrote : "Parisians have been puz- 
zled by the phrase 'ataboy' which Americans 
are prone to employ in moments of stress or 
emotion. The phrase is undoubtedly a con- i 
traction of 'at her boy' and may be closely | 
approximated by *au travail, garc^on.' '' The 
writer followed with a brief history of the 
friendly relations of France and America and 
paid a glowing tribute to the memory of 
Lafayette. 

The name for the American soldiers gave 
the French press and public no end of trouble. 
They began enthusiastically enough by calling 
them the "Teddies," but General Pershing, 
when interviewed one day, said that he did not 
think this name quite fitting as it had "no 
national significance." The French then fol- 
lowed the suggestion of one of the American 
cori-espondents and began to call the soldiers 
"Sammies," or as the French pronounce it, 

38 



FRANCO-AMERICAN HONEYMOON 

"Sammees." Although this name received 
much attention in French and American news- 
papers it has never caught the fancy of the sol- 
diers in the American Expeditionary Army. 
Officers and men cordially despise it and no 
soldier ever refers to himself or a comrade as 
a "Sammy." American officers have not been 
unmindful of the usefulness of a name for our 
soldiers. Major General Sibert, who com- 
manded the first division when it arrived in 
France, posted a notice at headquarters which 
read: "The English soldier is called Tommy. 
The French soldier is called poilu. The Com- 
manding General would like suggestions for a 
name for the American soldier." At the end 
of the week the following names had been writ- 
ten in answer to the General's request: 
"Yank, Yankee, Johnnie, Johnny Yank, 
Broncho, Nephew, Gringo, Liberty Boy, 
Doughboy." 

Now Doughboy is a name which the soldiers 
use, but strictly speaking, it refers only to an 
infantryman. The origin of the name is 
shrouded in mystery. One officer, probably an 
infantryman, has written, that the infantrymen 

39 



THE A. E. F. 

are called doughboys because they are the 
flower of the army. Another story has it that 
during some maneuvers in Texas an artillery- 
man, comfortably perched on a gun, saw a 
soldier hiking by in the thick sticky Texas 
mud. The mud was up to the shoetops of the 
infantryman and the upper part which had 
dried looked almost white. "Say," shouted the 
artilleryman, "whatVe you been doing? 
Walking in dough?" And so the men who 
march have been doughboys ever since. 

Paris did not let the lack of a name come 
between her and the soldiers. The theaters 
gave the Americans almost as much recog- 
nition as the press. No musical show was com- 
plete without an American finale and each 
soubrette learned a little English, "I give 
you kees," or something like that, to please the 
doughboys. The vaudeville shows, such as 
those provided at the Olympia or the Alham- 
bra, gave an even greater proportion of Eng- 
lish speech. The Alhambra was filled with 
Tommies and doughboys on the night I went. 
Now and again the comedians had lapses of 
language and the Americans were forced to 

40 



FRANCO-AMERICAN HPNEYMOON 

let jokes go zipping by without response. It 
was a pity, too, for they were good jokes even 
if French. Presently, however, a fat comedian 
fell off a ladder and laughter became general 
and international. The show was more richly 
endowed with actresses than actors. The man- 
agement was careful to state that all the male 
performers had fulfilled their military obliga- 
tions. Thus, under the picture of Maurice 
Chevalier, a clever comedian and dancer, one 
read that Mons. Chevalier was wounded at the 
battle of Cutry, when a bullet passed between 
his lungs. The story added that he was cap- 
tured by the Germans and held prisoner for 
twenty-six months before he escaped. It did 
not seem surprising therefore that Chevalier 
should be the gayest of funny men. Twenty- 
six months of imprisonment would work won- 
ders with ever so many comedians back home. 

And yet we Americans missed the old patter 
until there came a breath from across the sea. 
A low comedian came out and said to his part- 
ner in perfectly good English: "Well, didja 
like the show?" His partner said he didn't 
like the show. "Well, didja notice the trained 

41 



THE A. E. F. 

seals?" persisted the low comedian and the 
lower comedian answered: "No, the wind was 
against 'em." Laughter long delayed over- 
came us then, but it was mingled with tears. 
We felt that we were home again. The French 
are a wonderful people and all that, of course, 
but they're so darn far away. 

Later there was a man who imitated Eddie 
Foy imperfectly and a bad bicycle act in which 
the performers called the orchestra leader 
"Professor" and shouted "Ready" to each 
other just before missing each trick. This 
bucked the Americans up so much that a lapse 
into French with Suzanne Valroger "dans son 
repertoire" failed to annoy anybody very much. 
The doughboys didn't care whether she came 
back with her repertoire or on it. Some Japa- 
nese acrobats and a Swedish contortionist com- 
pleted the performance. There are two such 
international music halls in Paris as well as a 
musical comedy of a sort called "The Good 
Luck Girl." The feature of this performance 
is an act in which a young lady swings over 
the audience and invites the soldiers to capture 
the shoe dangling from her right foot. The 

42 



FRANCO-AMERICAN HONEYMOON 

shoe is supposed to be very lucky and soldiers 
try hard to get it, standing up in their seats 
and snatching as the girl swings by. An 
American sergeant was the winner the night I 
went to the show, for he climbed upon a com- 
rade's shoulder and had the slipper off before 
the girl had time to swing out very far. Later, 
when he went to the trenches, the sergeant took 
the shoe with him and he says that up to date he 
has no reason to doubt the value of the charm. 

The most elaborate spectacle inspired by the 
coming of the Americans was at the Folies 
Bergeres which sent its chorus out for the final 
number all spangled with stars. The leader of 
the chorus was an enormous woman, at least 
six feet tall, who carried an immense Amer- 
ican flag. She almost took the head off a 
Canadian one night as he dozed in a stage box 
and failed to notice the violent manner in which 
the big flag was being swung. He awoke just 
in time to dodge and then he shook an accusing 
finger at the Amazon. "Why aren't you in 
khaki?" he said. 

Restaurants as well as theaters were liberally 
sprinkled with men in the American uniform. 

43 



THE A. E. F. 

The enlisted men ate for the most part in 
French barracks and seemed to fare well 
enough, although one doughboy, after being 
served with spinach as a separate course, com- 
plained: "I do wish they'd get all the stuff on 
the table at once like we do in the army. I 
don't want to be surprised, I want to be fed." 
A young first lieutenant was scornful of 
French claims to master cookery. "Why, they 
don't know how to fry eggs," he said. "I've 
asked for fried eggs again and again and do 
you know what they do? They put 'em in a 
little dish and bake 'em." 

Yet, barring this curious and barbarous cus- 
tom in the cooking of eggs, the French chefs 
were able to charm the palates of Americans 
even in a year which bristled with food restric- 
tions. There were two meatless days a week, 
sugar was issued in rations of a pound a month 
per person and bread was gray and gritty. 
The French were always able to get around 
these handicaps. The food director, for in- 
stance, called the ice cream makers together 
and ordered them to cease making their prod- 
uct in order to save sugar. 



FRANCO-AMERICAN HONEYMOON 

"We have been using a substitute for sugar 
for seven months," repHed the merchants. 

"Well, then," said the food director, "it will 
save eggs." 

"We have hit upon a method which makes 
eggs unnecessary," replied the ice cream 
makers. 

"At any rate," persisted the food director, 
"my order will save unnecessary consumption 
of milk." 

"We use a substitute for that, too," the con- 
fectioners answered, and they were allowed to 
go on with their trade. 

The cooks are even more ingenious than the 
confectioners. As long as they have the ma- 
terials with which to compound sauces, meat 
makes little difference. War bread might be 
terrapin itself after a French chef has softened 
and sabled it with thick black dressing. Amer- 
icans found that the French took food much 
more seriously than we do in America. Pa- 
trons always reviewed the carte du jour care- 
fully before making a selection. It was not 
enough to get something which would do. The 
meal would fall something short of success if 

45 



THE A. E. F. 

the diner did not succeed in getting what he 
wanted most. No waiter ever hurried a sol- 
dier who was engaged in the task of compos- 
ing a dinner. He might be a man who was 
going back to the trenches the next day and 
in such a case this last good meal would not be 
a matter to be entered upon lightly. After all, 
if it is a last dinner a man wants to consider 
carefully, whether he shall order contrefilet a 
la Bourguignon or poulet roti a VEspagnol, 

Whatever may be his demeanor while en- 
gaged in the business of making war or order- 
ing a meal, the Frenchman makes his permis- 
sion a real vacation. He talks a good deal of 
shop. The man at the next table is telling of a 
German air raid, only, naturally, he calls them 
Boches. A prison camp, he explains, was bril- 
liantly illuminated so that the Boche prisoners 
might not escape under the cover of darkness. 
One night the enemy aviators came over that 
way and mistook the prison camp for a rail- 
road station. They dropped a number of 
bombs and killed ten of their comrades. 
Everybody at the soldier's table regarded this 
as a good joke, more particularly as the nar- 

46 



FRANCO-AMERICAN HONEYMOON 

rator vivified the incident by rolling his war 
bread into pellets and bombarding the table 
by way of illustration, accompanied by loud 
cries of "Plop! Plop!" 

Practically every man on permission in Paris 
is making love to someone and usually in an 
open carriage or at the center table of a large 
restaurant. Nobody even turns around to look 
if a soldier walks along a street with his arm 
about a girl's waist. American officers, how- 
ever, frowned on such exhibitions of demon- 
strativeness by doughboys and in one provin- 
cial town a colonel issued an order: "Amer- 
ican soldiers will not place their arms around 
the waists of young ladies while walking in 
any of the principal thoroughfares of this 
town." 

Still it was not possible to regulate romance 
entirely out of existence. "There was a girl 
used to pass my car every morning," said a 
sergeant chauffeur, "and she was so good look- 
ing that I got a man to teach me 'bon jour/ 
and I used to smile at her and say that when 
she went by and she'd say ^bon jour' and smile 
back. One morning I got an apple and I 

47 



THE A. E. F. 

handed' it to her and said 'pour vous' like I'd 
been taught. She took it and came right back 
with, *Oh, I'm ever so much obliged,' and there 
like a chump I'd been holding myself down to 
'bon jour^ for two weeks." 

There could be no question of the devotion 
of Paris to the American army. Indeed, so 
rampant was affection that it was occasionally 
embarrassing. One officer slipped in alighting 
from the elevator of his 'hotel and sprained his 
ankle rather badly. He was hobbling down 
one of the boulevards that afternoon with the 
aid of a cane when a large automobile dashed 
up to the curb and an elderly French lady who 
was the sole occupant beckoned to him and 
cried: "'Premier hlesse" The officer hesitated 
and a man who was passing stepped up and 
said: "May I interpret for you?" The officer 
said he would be much obliged. The volunteer 
interpreter talked to the old lady for a moment 
and then he turned and explained: "Madame 
is desirous of taking you in her car wherever 
you want to go, because she says she is anxious 
to do something for the first American soldier 
wounded on the soil of France." 

48 



FRANCO-AMERICAN HONEYMOON 

The devotion of Paris was so obvious that it 
palled on one or two who grew fickle. I saw 
a doughboy sitting in front of the Cafe de la 
Paix one bright afternoon. He was drinking 
champagne of a sort and smoking a large cigar. 
The sun shone on one of the liveliest streets of 
a still gay Paris. It was a street made brave 
with bright uniforms. Brighter eyes of 
obvious non-combatants gazed at him with ad- 
miration. I was sitting at the next table and 
I leaned over and asked: "How do you like 
Paris?" 

He let the smoke roll lazily out of his mouth 
and shook his head. "I wish I was back in 
El Paso," he said. 

I found another soldier who was longing for 
Terre Haute. Him I came upon in the 
lounging room of a music hall called the Olym- 
pia. Two palpably pink ladies sat at the bar 
drinking cognac. From his table a few feet 
away the American soldier looked at them with 
high disfavor. Surprise, horror and indigna- 
tion swept across his face in three waves as the 
one called Julie began to puff a cigarette after 
giving a light to Margot. He looked away at 

49 



THE A. E. F. 

last when he could stand no more, and recog- 
nizing me as a fellow countryman, he began 
his protest. 

"I don't like this Paris," he said. "I'm in 
the medical corps," he continued. "My home's 
in Terre Haute. In Indiana, you know. I 
worked in a drug store there before I joined 
the army. I had charge of the biggest soda 
fountain in town. We used to have as many 
as three men working there in summer some- 
times. Right at a good business corner, you 
know, I suppose we had almost as many men 
customers as ladies." 

"Why don't you like Paris?" I interrupted. 

"Well, it's like this," he answered. "No- 
body can say I'm narrow. I believe in people 

having a good time, but " and he leaned 

nearer confidentially, "I don't like this Bo- 
hemia. I'd heard about it, of course, but I 
didn't know it was so bad. You see that girl 
there, the one in the blue dress smoking a cigar- 
ette, sitting right up to the bar. Well, you 
may believe it or not, but when I first sat down 
she came right over here and said, 'Hello, 
American. You nice boy. I nice girl. You 

50 



FRANCO-AMERICAN HONEYMOON 

buy me a drink.' I never saw her before in my 
life, you understand, and I didn't even look at 
her till she spoke to me. I told her to go away 
or I'd call a policeman and have her arrested. 
I've been in Paris a week now, but I don't 
think I'll ever get used to this Bohemia busi- 
ness. It's too effusive, that's what I call it. 
I'd just like to see them try to get away with 
some of that business in Terre Haute." 

Some of the visiting soldiers took more 
kindly to Paris as witness the plaint of a mid- 
dle-aged Franco- American in the employ of 
theY. M. C. A.: 

"I'm a guide for the Young Men's Christian 
Association here in Paris," he said, "but I'm 
a little bit afraid I'm going to lose my job. 
They make up parties of soldiers at the Y. M. 
C. A. headquarters every day and turn them 
over to me to show around the city. Well, 
Monday I started out with twelve and came 
back with five and today I finished up with 
three out of eight. I can't help it. I've got 
no authority over them, and if they want to 
leave the party, what can I do? But it makes 
trouble for me at headquarters. Now, today, 

51 



THE A. E. F. 

for instance, I took them first of all to the 
Place Vendome. There were seven infantry- 
men and an artilleryman. They seemed to be 
interested in the column when I told them that 
it was made out of cannon captured by Na- 
poleon. They wanted to know how many can- 
non it took and what caliber they were and all 
that. Everything went all right until we 
started for the Madeleine. We passed a cafe 
on the way and one of the soldiers asked: 
* What's this "vin" I see around on shops?' 
I told him that it was the French word for 
wine and that it was pronounced almost like 
our word Van' only a little bit more nasal. 
They all looked at the sign then, and another 
soldier said: *I suppose that "bieres" there is 
"beers," isn't it?' 

"I told him that it was and another guessed 
that 'brune ou blonde' must mean 'dark or 
light.' When I said that it did, he wanted to 
know if he couldn't stop and have one. I told 
him that I couldn't wait for him, as the whole 
trip was on a schedule and we had to be at the 
Madeleine at three o'clock. 'Well,' he said, 'I 
guess it'll be there tomorrow,' and he went into 

52 



FRANCO-AMERICAN HONEYMOON! 

the cafe. Another soldier said: 'Save a 
"blonde" for me,' and followed him, and that 
was two gone. 

"After I had showed the rest the Madeleine 
I told them that I was going to take them to 
St. Augustin. The artilleryman wanted to 
know if that was another church. I said it was 
and he said he guessed he'd had enough for a 
day. I tried to interest him in the paintings 
in the chapel by Bouguereau and Brisset, but 
he said he wasn't used to walking so much 
anyway. He was no doughboy, he said, and he 
left us. We lost another fellow at Maxim's 
and the fifth one disappeared in broad day- 
light on the Boulevard Malesherbes. He can 
count up to twenty in French and he knows 
how to say: *Ou est I'hotel St. Anne?' which is 
army headquarters, so I guess he's all right, but 
I haven't aa idea in the world what became of 
him." 

The high tide in the American conquest of 
Paris came one afternoon in July. I got out 
of a taxicab in front of the American head- 
quarters in the Rue Constantine and found 
that a big crowd had gathered in the Esplanade 

53 



THE A. E. F. 

des Invalides. Now and again the crowd 
would give ground to make room for an Amer- 
ican soldier running at top speed. One of 
them stood almost at the entrance of the court- 
yard of "Invalides." His back was turned 
toward the tomb of Napoleon and he was 
knocking out flies in the direction of the Seine. 
Unfortunately it was a bit far to the river 
and no baseball has yet been knocked into that 
stream. It was a new experience for Napoleon 
though. He has heard rifles and machine guns 
and other loud reports in the streets of Paris, 
but for the first time there came to his ears the 
loud sharp crack of a bat swung against a 
baseball. Since he could not see from out the 
tomb the noise may have worried the emperor. 
Perhaps he thought it was the British winning 
new battles on other cricket fields. But again 
he might not worry about that now. He might 
hop up on one toe as a French caricaturist 
pictured him and cry: "Vive I'Angleterre." 

One of the men in the crowd which watched 
the batting practice was a French soldier 
headed back for the front. At any rate he had 
his steel helmet on and his equipment was on 

54 



FRANCO-AMERICAN HONEYMOON 

his back. His stripes showed that he had been 
in the war three years and he had the croix de 
guerre with two palms and the medaille mili- 
taire. His interest in the game grew so high 
at last that he put down his pack and his hel- 
met and joined the outfielders. The second or 
third ball hit came in his direction. He ran 
about in a short cu-cle under the descending 
ball and at the last moment he thrust both 
hands in front of his face. The ball came be- 
tween them and hit him in the nose, knocking 
him down. 

His nose was a little bloody, but he was up 
in an instant grinning. He left the field to 
pick up his trench hat and his equipment. The 
Americans shouted to him to come back. He 
understood the drift of their invitation, but he 
shook his head. "C'est danger eux," he said, 
and started for the station to catch his train for 
the front. 



CHAPTER V 

WITHIN SOUND OF THE GUNS 

The men had traveled to Paris in passenger 
coaches, but when it came time to move the 
first division to its training area in the Vosges 
our soldiers rode like all the other allied armies 
in the famous cars upon which are painted 
"Hommes 36; chevaux en long, 8." And, of 
course, anybody who knows French under- 
stands the caption to mean that the horses 
must be put in lengthwise and not folded. No 
restrictions are mentioned as to the method of 
packing the "hommes." 

The journey lay through gorgeous rolling 
country which was all a sparkle at this season 
of the year. Presently the vineyards were left 
behind and the hills became higher. Now and 
again there were fringes of pine trees. At 
one point it was possible to see a French cap- 
tive balloon floating just beyond the hilltops, 

56 



WITHIN SOUND OF GUNS 

but we could not hear the guns yet. French 
soldiers in troop trains and camps near the 
track cheered the Americans and even a few 
of the Germans inside a big stockade waved 
at the men who were moving forward to study- 
war. The trains stopped at a little town which 
lay at the foot of a hill. It was a mean little 
town, but on the hill was the fine old tower 
of a castle which had once dominated the sur- 
rounding country. 

From this town, which was chosen as divi- 
sional headquarters, regiments were sent 
northeast and northwest into tiny villages 
which were no more than a single line of houses 
along the roadway. A few one-story wooden 
barracks had been built for the Americans, but 
ninety per cent, of the men went into billets. 
They were quartered in the lofts of barns of 
the better sort. The billeting officers would 
not consider sheds where cattle had been kept. 
Few troops had been quartered in this part of 
the country previously and so the barns were 
moderately clean. 

The effort to make cleanliness and sanita- 
tion something more than relative terms was 

57 



THE A. E. F. 

the first thing which really threatened Franco- 
American amity. The decision of American 
officers that all manure piles must be removed 
from in front of dwelling houses met a startled 
and universal protest. Elderly Frenchwomen 
explained with great feeling that the manure 
piles had been there as long as they could re- 
member and that no one had ever come to any 
harm from them. The American officers in- 
sisted, and at last a grudging consent was 
forced. I saw one old lady almost on the point 
of tears as she watched the invaders demolish 
her manure pile. At last she could stand no 
more. "They make a lot of dust," she said 
critically, and went into the house. 

A few days after the Americans arrived in 
camp came their instructors. A crack division 
of Alpine Chasseurs was chosen to teach the 
Americans. Nobody called these men frog- 
gies. They called them "chassers." It was 
enough to see them march to know that they 
were fighting men. Their stride was short and 
quick. Each step was taken as if the marcher 
was eager to have it over and done v/ith so that 
he could take another. Even their buglers won 

58 



WITHIN SOUND OF GUNS 

admiration, for they had a trick of throwing 
their instruments in the air and catching them 
again that brought envy to the heart of every 
American band. Indeed, a good deal of 
friendly rivalry developed from the beginning 
and in the early days, at least, the French had 
all the better of it. They could lift heavier 
weights than our men, who averaged much 
younger. Little Frenchmen standing five feet 
three or four would seize a rifle close to the 
end of the bayonet and slowly raise it with stiff 
arm to horizontal and down again. American 
farmer boys tried and failed. Of course, this 
was a crack French division which drew its 
men from various organizations, while our 
division was just the average lot and perhaps 
not quite that since there was a larger per- 
centage of recruits than is usually found in 
the regular army. 

Although our men were somewhat out- 
classed by their instructors in these early days, 
they were game in their effort to keep up com- 
petition. Almost the first work to which the 
troops were set was trench digging. This is 
one of the most important arts of war and also 

59 



THE A. E. F. 

the most tiresome. Somebody has said of the 
Canadians: "They will die in the last ditch, 
but they won't dig it." The Americans have 
a similar aversion for work with pick and 
shovel, but trench digging came to them as a 
competition. I saw a battalion of the chas- 
seurs and a battalion of marines set to work 
in a field where every other blow of the pick 
hit a rock. There was no chance to loaf, for 
when a marine looked over his shoulder he 
could see the French picks going for dear life 
down at the other end of the trench. At four- 
thirty the men were told to call it a day. The 
chasseurs leaped out of their trench; threw 
down their tools, and began to sing at top 
voice a popular Parisian love ditty entitled 
"II faut de Tamour." One of the French of- 
ficers told me afterwards that it was the in- 
variable custom of his men to sing at the end 
of work, but the marines thought the "chas- 
sers" were merely showing off the excellent 
nature of their wind. More slowly the Amer- 
icans clambered but of their trench, but they 
were ready when the last French note died 

60 



WITHIN SOUND OF GUNS 

away and piped up somewhat breathlessly: 
"Hail! Hail! the gang's all here!" 

American company commanders were quick 
to appreciate the value of organized singing in 
the training of troops, and for the next few 
days the doughboys were drilled to lift their 
voices as well as their picks. Most of all, 
music was appreciated in the long hikes of the 
early training period. A good song did much 
to make a marching man forget that he had a 
fifty-pound pack on his back. 

"I know I'm beginning to get a real com- 
pany now," one captain told me, "because 
whenever they're beginning to feel tired they 
start to sing and freshen up." "No," he said, 
in reply to a question, "they didn't just start. 
It needed a little fixing. I noticed that when 
the Frenchmen stopped work they always 
started back to camp singing. *We can do 
that,' I told my men when we started back. 
Xet's hear a little noise.' Nothing happened. 
Nobody wanted to begin. They were scared 
the others would laugh at them. I can't carry 
a tune two feet, but I just struck up 'We'll 
hang the damned old Kaiser to a sour apple 

61 



THE A. E. F. 

tree' to the tune of *John Brown's Body.' A 
few joined in, but most of them wouldn't open 
their mouths. I told 'em, 'I'm just going to 
keep on marching this company until every- 
body's in on the song. I don't care if we have 
to march all night.' That got 'em going. Now 
they like it. They're thinking up new songs 
every day. I can save my voice now." 

One of the reasons for sending the men into 
the Vosges for training was to get them within 
sound of the guns, but it was almost a week 
before we heard any of the doings at the front. 
It was at night time that we first heard the 
guns. It was a still, windless night and along 
about eight o'clock they began. You couldn't 
be quite sure whether you heard them or felt 
them, but something was stirring. It felt or 
sounded a good deal as if some giant across 
the hills had slammed the door of his castle 
as he left home to take the morning train for 
business. Up at the northern end of the train- 
ing area the sound of the guns was much more 
distinct. In fact, they w^ere loud enough some 
nights to become identified in the mind as 
events and not mere rumblings. A Sammy 

62 



WITHIN SOUND OF GUNS 

up in that village stopped our car one morn- 
ing and asked if we couldn't give him a news- 
paper. 

"I suppose you want to know how the base- 
ball games are coming out," somebody sug- 
gested. 

"To hell with baseball, I want to know about 
the war," said the soldier. "I'm with these 
mules," he said, pointing to half a dozen ani- 
mals tethered on the bank of a canal. "I've 
been with them right from the beginning, I 
came over on the same steamer with 'em. I 

rode up with 'em in the train from and 

here we are again. I don't hear nothing. 
They could capture Berlin and nobody'd tell 
me about it. All I do is feed these damned 
mules. 'Big Bill,' that one on the end, is sick, 
and I've got to hang around and give him a 
pill every six hours. I wish he'd choke. I 
don't like him as well as the rest of the mules 
and I hate 'em all. 

"It'll be fine, won't it, when somebody asks 
me: *Daddy, what did you do in the great war?' 
and I say: 'Oh, I sat up with a sick mule.' " 

Back of the hills from some indefinite dis- 
63 



THE A. E. F. 

tance came the sound of big guns. They raged 
persistently for ten minutes and then quit. 
"Big Bill" began to rear around and kick. 
The soldier cursed him. 

"Those guns were going like that all night, 
but mostly around two o'clock," he said. "No- 
body around here knows anything about it. I 
wish I could get hold of an American paper 
and find out something about that fight. I've 
sent to Memphis for The News Scimitar, but 
somehow it don't seem to get here. I wish 
those guns was near enough to drop something 
over here on the mules, especially 'Big Bill,' 
but I'm out of luck." 

The nearest approach of the war was in the 
air. It wasn't long before German planes be- 
gan to scout over the territory occupied by the 
Americans. One battalion almost saw an air 
fight. It would have seen it if the Major 
hadn't said "Attention!" just then. The bat- 
talion was drilling in a big open meadow when 
there came from the East first a whirr and then 
a machine. The machine, flying high, circled 
the field. The soldiers who were standing at 
ease stared up at the visitor, but it was too 

64 



WITHIN SOUND OF GUNS 

high to see the identifying marks. Soon there 
was no doubt that the machine was German, 
for little white splotches appeared in the sky. 
It looked as if Charlie Chaplin had thrown a 
cream pie at heaven and it had splattered. 
An anti-aircraft gun concealed in a woods 
several miles away was firing at the Boche. 
Presently the firing ceased and there was a 
whirr from the West. A French plane flew 
straight in the direction of the German, who 
climbed higher and higher. As the planes 
drew nearer it was possible to see machine gun 
flashes, but just then the Major called his men 
to attention. Regulations provide that eyes 
must look straight ahead, but it was a hard test 
for recruits and there may have been one or 
two who stole a glance up there where the 
planes were fighting. In each case an officer 
was on the culprit like a flash. 

"Keep your head still," shouted a lieutenant. 
"That's a private fight. It's got nothing to 
do with you." 

Soon the German turned and flew back in 
the direction of his own lines and when the 
necks of the doughboys were unfettered and 

65 



THE A. E. F. 

they could look up again the sky was clear. 
Even the cream puff splotches were gone. 

On another afternoon a Boche plane flew 
over the entire American area. It circled a 
field in divisional headquarters where a base- 
ball game was in progress and flew home. 

"I know why that German flew home after 

he reached ," an officer explained. 

"Don't you see ? He was trying to find out if 
we were Americans and that baseball game 
proved it to him." 

The greatest aerial display occurred on a 
morning when a French officer was instruct- 
ing an American company in the art of trench 
digging. He spoke no English, but an inter- 
preter of a sort was making what shift he 
could. The doughboys tried to look interested 
and didn't succeed. It was harder when out 
from behind a cloud came one aeroplane, then 
another and another. When half a dozen had 
appeared from behind the cloud one doughboy 
could stand the strain no longer. 

"Look," he shouted, "they're hatching them 
up there." 

The French instructor finally granted a re- 
66 



WITHIN SOUND OF GUNS 

cess of ten minutes but before the time was up 
the planes had maneuvered out of sight. In 
spite of all the German activity in the air only 
one attempt was made to bomb the Americans 
during the summer. A single bomb was 
dropped on a village where the marines were 
stationed, but it did no damage. 

The second week in the training area found 
the doughboys increasing their curriculum to 
include bombs and machine guns. It had not 
been possible to do much in the finer arts of 
war previously because of the absence of in- 
terpreters. A number of these had been 
mobilized now but they varied in quality. As 
one American officer put it, "Interpreters may 
be divided into three classes: those who know 
no English; those who know no French; and 
those who know neither." 

However, the Americans managed to get 
their instruction in some way or other. No 
interpreters were needed with the machine 
guns. Instead each American company was 
divided up into little groups and a chasseur 
placed at the head of each group. I watched 
the instruction and found that little language 

67 



THE A. E. F. 

was needed. The Frenchman would take a 
machine giin or automatic rifle apart and hold- 
ing up each part give its French name. The 
Americans paid no particular attention to the 
outlandish terms which the French used for 
their machine gun parts, but they were alert 
to notice the manner in which the gun was put 
together and in the group in which I was stand- 
ing two Americans were able to put the gun 
together without having any parts left over 
after a single demonstration. 

Of course, a little language was used. Some 
of the marines had picked up a little very vil- 
lainous French in Hayti and they made what 
shift they could with that. A few French Ca- 
nadians and an occasional man from New Or- 
leans could converse with the chasseurs and 
one or two phrases had been acquired by men 
hitherto entirely ignorant of French. "Qu'est- 
ce-que c'est?" was used by the purists as their 
form of interrogation, but there were others 
who tried to make "combien" do the work. 
"Combien," which we pronounced ''come 
bean," w^as stretched for many purposes. I 
have heard it used and accepted as an equiva- 

68 



WITHIN SOUND OF GUNS 

lent for "whereabouts," "what did you say," 
"why," "which one" and "will you please show 
us once more how to put that machine gun to- 
gether." 

Not only did the Americans show an apti- 
tude for getting the hang of the mechanism of 
the machine gun and the automatic rifle, but 
thej^ shot well with them after a little bit of 
practice. 

The first man I watched at v/ork with the 
automatic rifle was green. He had taken the 
gun apart and put it together again with an oc- 
casional "regardez" and bit of demonstration 
from one of the Frenchmen, but the weapon 
was not yet his pal. He picked the gun up 
somewhat gingerly and aimed at the line of 
targets a couple of hundred yards away. Then 
he pulled the trigger and the bucking thing, 
which seemed to be intent on wriggling out of 
his arms, sprayed the top of the hill with bul- 
lets. The French instructor made a laughing 
comment and an American who spoke the lan- 
guage explained, "He says you ought to be in 
the anti-aircraft service." 

The next man to try his luck was a non- 
60 



THE A. E. F. 

commissioned officer long in the army. He 
patted the gun and wooed it a little in whispers 
before he shot. It was a French gun, to be 
sure, but the language of firearms is interna- 
tional. "Behave, Betsy," he said and she did. 
He sprayed shots along the line of targets at 
the bottom of the hill as the gun clattered away 
with all the clamor of a riveting machine at 
seven in the morning. When they looked at 
the targets they found he had scored thirty 
hits out of thirty-four and some were bulFs- 
eyes. The French instructor was so pleased 
that he stepped forward as if to hug the an- 
cient sergeant but the veteran's look of horror 
dissuaded him. 

Bombing proved the most popular part of 
training and particularly as soon as it was pos- 
sible to work with the live article. First of 
all dummy "bombs were issued. A French of- 
ficer carefully explained that the bomb should 
be thrown after four moves, counting one, two, 
three, four, as he posed something like a shot 
putter before he let the bomb go with an over- 
hand, stiff, armed fling. He illustrated the 
method several times, but the first American 

70 



WITHIN SOUND OF GUNS 

to throw sent the bomb spinning out on a line 
just as if he were hurrying a throw to first 
from deep short. The Frenchman reproved 
him and explained carefully that, although it 
might be possible to throw a bomb a long way 
in the manner in which a baseball is thrown, 
it was necessary for a bomber to hurl many 
missiles and that he must preserve his arm. He 
also pointed out that the bomb would never 
land in the trenches of the enemy unless it was 
thrown with a considerable arc. 

The men then kept to the exercises laid 
down by the instructor, but just before they 
stopped one or two could not resist the tempta- 
tion of again "putting something on to it" and 
letting the bomb sail out fast. One lefthander 
who had pitched for a season in the Southern 
League was anxious to make some experiments 
to see if he couldn't throw a bomb with an out 
curve but he was informed that such an ac- 
,complishment would have no military utility. 

The first American wounded in France was 
the victim of a bombing accident. A soldier 
threw a live bomb more than thirty meters from 
a trench. When the bomb burst a fragment 

71 



THE A. E. F. 

came whirling back in some curious manner 
and fell into a box of grenades upon which a 
lieutenant was sitting. The fragment cut the 
pin of one of the bombs and the whole box 
went off with a bang. The lieutenant received 
only a slight cut on his forehead, but a French 
interpreter thirty yards away was knocked un- 
conscious and lost the sight of his right eye. 
This Frenchman had spent two years under 
fire at Verdun without being scratched and 
here was his first wound come upon him on a 
quiet afternoon in a meadow miles from the 
lines. 

The men threw bombs from deep trenches 
and they were instructed to keep cover closely 
after hurling a grenade just as if there was a 
German trench across the way. But curiosity 
was too strong for them. Each wanted to see 
where his particular bomb hit and how much 
earth it would tear up. The bombs made only 
small scars in the earth, but they sent frag- 
ments of steel casing flying in all directions 
and several men were cut about the face by 
splinters. 

The seeming inability of the American to 
72 



WITHIN SOUND OF GUNS 

visualize battle conditions in training retards 
his progress in spite of his aptitude in other 
directions. A French officer was directing a 
platoon of Americans one day in skirmishing. 
They were to fire a round, run forward twenty 
paces, throw themselves flat and run forward 
again. One doughboy would raise himself up 
on his elbows and look about. The French- 
man, very much excited, ran over to him and 
said, "You must keep your head down or you 
will get shot. You must remember that bul- 
lets are flying all about you." 

As soon as the instructor's back was turned 
the soldier was up on his elbows again. 
"Hell," he said, "there ain't any bullets." 

In later phases of training the inferiority of 
the American to the French in imagination 
showed clearly. French veterans or recruits 
for that matter could work themselves up to 
a frenzy in sham battles and dash into an empty 
trench with a shout as if it were filled with Ger- 
mans. Americans could not do that. They 
found it difficult to forget that practice was 
just practice. 



CHAPTER VI 

SUNNY FRANCE 

Later on "Sunny France" became a mock- 
ing byword uttered by wet and muddy men, 
but during the early days in the training area 
no one had any just complaint about the 
weather. Come to think of it there wasn't any- 
thing very wrong with those early days in 
rural France. Five o'clock was pretty early 
for getting up but the sun could do it and keep 
cheerful. It was glorious country with hills 
and forests and plowed fields and red roofed 
villages and smooth white roads. The coun- 
try people didn't throw their hats in the air 
like Parisians, but they were kindly though 
calm. 

"Down in ," said a little doughboy who 

came from an Indiana farm, "everybody you 
meet says *bon jour' to you whether they know 
you or not. That means 'good morning.' I 

74 



SUNNY FRANCE 

was in Chicago once and they don't do it 
there." 

It wasn't Eden though. There was the to- 
bacco situation against that theory. To a 
good many soldiers, pleasant weather and 
kindly folk and ample rations meant nothing 
much. These were minor things. The quar- 
termaster had no Bull Durham. When the 
supply of American tobacco and cigarettes 
ran out the men tried the French products but 
not for long. "So they call these Grenades," 
muttered a soldier as he examined a popular 
French brand of cigarettes, "I guess that's be- 
cause you'd better throw 'em away right after 
you set 'em going." 

French matches were less popular than 
French tobacco. The kind they sold in our 
town and thereabouts were all tipped with 
sulphur and usually exploded with a blue flame 
maiming the smoker and amusing the specta- 
tors. Political economists and others inter- 
ested in the law of supply and demand may be 
interested to know that when the tobacco fa- 
mine was at its height a package of Bull Dur- 
ham worth five cents in America was sold by 

75 



THE A. E. F. 

one soldier to another for five francs. This 
shortage has since been relieved from several 
sources, but there has never been more tobacco 
than the soldiers could smoke. 

Reading matter was also ardently desired 
during the early months in the Vosges. An 
enterprising storekeeper in one town sent a 
hurry call to Paris for English books and a 
week later she proudly displayed the follow- 
ing volumes on her shelves: "The Life of 
Dean Stanley," "Sermons by the Rev. C. H. 
Spurgeon," "The Jubilee Book of Cricket," 
"The Reminiscences of Sir Henry Hawkins 
(Lord of Brampton)," and "The Recollec- 
tions of the Rt. Hon. Sir Algernon West." 

A few companies had libraries of their own. 
I wonder who made the selection of titles. The 
volumes I picked out at random in one village 
were : "The Family Life of Heinrich Heine," 
"Fourteen Weeks in Astronomy," "Recollec- 
tions and Letters of Renan," "Education and 
the Higher Life," "Bible Stories for the 
Young," and "Henry the Eighth and His Six 
Wives." The librarian said that the last was 
the most popular book in the collection al- 

76 



SUNNY FRANCE 

though several readers admitted that it did not 
come up to expectations. Just as I was going 
out the top sergeant came in to return a book. 
I asked him what it was. He said, "It's a book 
called ^When Patty Went to College.' " 

Our "town was big and had moving pictures 
twice a week, but up the line in the little vil- 
lages there was no such source of amusement. 
After the men had been in training for a week 
or more, a French Red Cross outfit stopped 
at one of the villages with a traveling movie 
outfit and announced that they would show a 
picture that night. According to the an- 
nouncement the picture was *' Chariot en *Le 
Vagabond.' " It sounded foreign and for- 
bidding. The doughboys anticipated trouble 
with the titles and the closeups of what the 
heroine wrote and all the various printed 
words which go to make a moving picture in- 
telligible. Still they were patient when the 
title of the picture was flashed on the screen 
and they tried to look interested. The first 
scene was a road winding up to a distant hill 
and down the highway with eccentric gait 
there walked a little man strangely reminis- 

77 



THE A. E. F. 

cent. He drew nearer and nearer and as the 
figure came into full view the soldier in front 
of me could stand the strain no longer. He 
jumped to his feet. 

"I'm a son of a gun," he shouted, "if it isn't 
Charlie Chaplin." 

Recognition upon the part of the audience 
was instantaneous and enthusiasm unbounded. 
If the Americans go out tomorrow and cap- 
ture Berlin they cannot possibly show more 
joy than they did at the sight of Charlie Chap- 
lin in France. Never again will the French 
be able to fool them by disguising him as 
"Chariot." 

After a bit the soldiers learned to entertain 
themselves and several companies developed a 
number of talented performers. The first 
company show I attended mixed boxing and 
music. They began with boxing. There was 
a short intermission during which the first 
tenor fixed up a bloody nose. He had re- 
ceived a bit the worst of it in the heavyweight 
bout. The other members of the quartet 
gave him cotton and encouragement. Finally 
he put on his shirt and hitching up his voice, 

78 



SUNNY FRANCE 

began, "Naught but a few faded roses can my 
sweet story tell." His comrades joined him 
at "My heart was ever light," and they fin- 
ished the ballad in perfect alignment. 

Almost all the songs were sentimental and 
many were old. They had "Dearie," and 
"Where the River Shannon Flows," and that 
one about Ireland falling out of Heaven (just 
as if the devil himself had not done the very 
same thing) . Later there were "Mother Ma- 
chree" and "Old Kentucky Home." Patriot- 
ism was not neglected. "When I Get Back 
Home Again to the U. S. A." was the favor- 
ite among the recent war songs. The only 
savor of army life in the program on this 
particular evening was in a couple of Mexican 
songs brought up from the border by men who 
went to get Villa. They brought back "Cuca- 
racha" with all its seventeen obscene Spanish 
verses. There was also one parody inspired 
by this war and sung to the tune of "My Lit- 
tle Girl, I'm Dreaming of You." It went 
something like this: 

America, I'm dreaming of you 
And I long for you each day 
79 



THE A. E. F. 

America, I'm fighting for you 

Tho' you're many miles away 

We'll knock the block right off the Kaiser 

And we'll drive them 'cross the Rhine — 

And then we'll sail back home to you, dear 

To the tune of "Wacht am Rhein" ! 

The American soldier does not seem to be 
much of a song maker. Songs by soldiers and 
for soldiers are not common with us yet. We 
have nothing as close to the spirit of the 
trenches as the British ditty "I want to go 
home," which always leaves the auditor in 
doubt as to whether he should take it seri- 
ously and weep or humorously and laugh. 
Possibly there is something of both elements 
in the song. The mixture has been typical of 
the British attitude toward the war. Here 
is the song: 

I want to go 'ome 

I want to go 'ome 

The Maxims they spit 

And the Johnsons they roar 

I don't want to go to the front any more 

Oh take me over the seas 

Where the Alley-mans can't get at me 

Oh my; I don't want to die, 

I want to go 'ome. 

80 



SUNNY FRANCE 

The American army is still looking for a 
song. None of the new ones has achieved uni- 
versal popularity. However the many who 
heard the quartet of Company L sing on 
this particular evening seemed to have no ob- 
jection to the old songs. In fact they were 
new to many in the audience for as the con- 
cert went on French soldiers joined the audi- 
ence and townspeople hung about the edges 
of the crowd. They listened politely and ap- 
plauded, though indeed one must get a strange 
impression of America if his introduction is 
through our popular songs. Such a foreigner 
is in danger of believing that ours is a June 
land in which the moon is always shining upon 
a young person known as "little girl." Yet 
the French expressed no astonishment at the 
songs. Only one feature puzzled them pro- 
foundly. At the end of a particularly effec- 
tive song the captain said, "Those men sang 
that very well. Bring 'em each a glass of 
water." 

No villager could quite understand why a 
man who had committed no more palpable 
crime than tenor singing should be forced to 

81 



THE A. E. F. 

partake of a drink which is cold, tasteless and 
watery. 

Most the villages in our part of France had 
only one dimension. They consisted of a line 
of houses on either side of the roadway and 
they were always huddled together. Land is 
too valuable in France to waste it on lawns 
and suchlike. Some of the villages were tiny 
and shabby, but none was too small or too 
mean to be without its little cafe. It took the 
doughboys some little time to get over their 
interest in the startling fact that champagne 
was within the reach of the working man, but 
they went back to beer in due course and now 
champagne is among the things which shop- 
keepers must not sell to American soldiers. 
The prohibition of the sale of cognac and 
champagne is all that the army needs. Beer 
and light wines are not a menace to the health 
or behavior of our army. Beer is by far the 
most popular drink and it would be an ambi- 
tious man indeed who would seek the slightest 
deviation from sobriety in the thin war beer of 
France. He might drown. 

Absolute prohibition for the army in France 
82 



SUNNY FRANCE 

would be well nigh impossible. It would 
mean that every inn and shop and railroad 
station and farmhouse would have to be classed 
as out of bounds. In fact prohibition could 
not be enforced unless our soldiers were or- 
dered never to venture within four walls. 
Wine is to be had under every roof in France 
and you can get it also in not a few places 
where the roof has been shot to pieces. The 
French are interested in temperance just now. 
On many walls posters are exhibited showing 
a German soldier and a black bottle with the 
caption, "They are both the enemies of 
France," but when a Frenchman talks of tem- 
perance or prohibition or the abolition of the 
liquor traffic he never thinks of including wine 
or beer. The civil authorities of France would 
not be much use in helping the American army 
enforce a bone-dry order. They simply 
wouldn't understand it. 

There v/as some excessive drinking when 
the army first came to France but it has been 
checked. A number of influences have made 
for discretion. One of the most potent is the 
opportunity for promotion in an army in the 

83 



THE A. E. F. 

field. Officers have been quick to point this 
out to their men. One captain called his com- 
pany together in the early days and said, 
''Some of the men in this company are going 
out and getting pinko, stinko, sloppy drunk. 
Any man who gets drunk goes in the guard 
house of course and more than that he will get 
no promotion from me. I'm going to pick my 
sergeants from the fellows that have got sense. 
You may notice that some of the men who 
drink are old soldiers. Don't take an example 
from that. Remember that's why they're old 
soldiers. There isn't any sense in blowing all 
your money in for booze. Now if I took my 
pay in a lump at the end of a month I could 
buy every cafe in this town and I could stay 
drunk for a year. That would be fine busi- 
ness, wouldn't it?" 

"I guess maybe I exaggerated a little about 
the length of time I could stay drunk," the 
captain told me afterwards, "but do you know 
that talk seems to have done the trick." 

One factor which worked for temperance 
was the French fashion of making drinking de- 
liberate and social. When an American can 

84 



SUNNY FRANCE 

be induced to sit down to his potion he is com- 
paratively safe. These little village cafes did 
no harm after the first brief period when the 
American soldier had his fling and they served 
the good purpose of encouraging fraterniza- 
tion between doughboy and poilu. 

The contact with French soldiers brought 
no great vocabulary to our men but if they 
learned few words they did get the hang of 
making their wants understood. In a week or 
two innkeepers or women in shops had no 
trouble at all in attending to the wants of 
Americans. Probably the French people 
made somewhat faster linguistic progress than 
the soldiers. The Americans were willing to 
be met at least halfway. When I asked one 
doughboy, "How do you get along with the 
French? Can you make them understand 
you?" he said, "Why, they're coming along 
pretty well. I think most of 'em will pick it 
up in time." 

But there was one French word the soldiers 
had to learn. That was "fineesh." The chil- 
dren forced that word upon them. They were 
always at the heels of the American soldiers. 

85 



THE A. E. F. 

They galloped the doughboys up and down the 
village streets in furious piggyback charges. 
They borrowed jam from company cooks and 
rode in the supply trucks. Of course there 
had to be an end to the rides, sometimes, and 
even to the jam and the only way to convince 
the children of France that an absolute un- 
shakable limit had been reached was to thrust 
two hands aloft and cry "fineesh." The old 
women liked the doughboys too because they 
would draw water from the wells for them 
and occasionally lend a hand in moving wood 
or wheat or fodder. Nor do I mean to imply 
that the younger women of the little villages 
did not esteem the doughboys. "Tell 'em back 
home that there aren't any good looking 
women in France," was the message that ever 
so many soldiers asked me to convey to anx- 
ious individuals in America. I hand the mes- 
sage on but must refuse to pass upon its sin- 
cerity. 

American officers got along well with the 
French but they never reached the same de- 
gree of chumminess that the men did. They 
met French officers at more or less formal 

86 



SUNNY FRANCE 

luncheons and had to go through a routine of 
speeches largely concerned with Lafayette 
and Rochambeau and Washington. Poilus 
and doughboys did not go so far back for their 
subjects of conversation. The American en- 
listed man had a great advantage over his of- 
ficer in the matter of language. He might 
know less French, but he was much more ready 
to experiment. An officer did not like to 
make mistakes. His was defensive French, a 
weapon to be used guardedly in cases of ex- 
treme need. When a visiting officer hurled 
a compliment at him he replied, but he seldom 
took the initiative. After all he was an Amer- 
ican officer and he feared to make himself ri- 
diculous by poor pronunciation and worse 
grammar. The soldier had no such scruples. 
He saw no reason why he should be any more 
abashed by French grammar than by English 
and as for pronunciation he followed the ad- 
vice of a little pamphlet called "The Amer- 
ican in France" which was rushed out by some 
French firm for sale to the American army. 
In the matter of pronunciation the book said, 
"Since pronunciation is the most difficult part 

87 



THE A. E. F. 

of any language the publishers of this book 
have decided to omit it." The soldiers were 
ready to adopt this method and only wished 
that it could be extended to other things. To 
trench digging for instance. 

The most daring man in the use of an unfa- 
miliar language was not a soldier but a sec- 
ond lieutenant. He took great pride in his 
talent for pantomime and asserted that his vo- 
cabulary of some thirty words and his gestures 
filled all his needs. He was somewhat star- 
tled though on an afternoon when he went into 
a shop to purchase "B. V. D.'s" and found the 
store in charge of the young daughter of the 
proprietor. Pantomime seemed hardly the 
thing and so he paused long to think up a word 
for the garment he wanted or some approxima- 
tion. At last he smiled and exclaimed brightly, 
"Chemise pour jambes, s'il vous plait." 

Stores were not the strong point of our bit 
of France. We soon came to regard our town 
as a metropolis because people journeyed 
there to make "shopping tours." One after- 
noon I marked fifteen visiting soldiers with 
their eyes glued against a shop window which 

88 



SUNNY FRANCE 

displayed half a dozen electric flashlights, two 
quarts of champagne, a French-English dic- 
tionary and a limited assortment of postcards. 
These, of course, were barred from the mail 
by censorship but the soldiers collected them 
to be taken home after the war. 

"These French postcards aren't exactly 
what some of the boys back home are going to 
expect," one soldier admitted. "I went to 
three shops now but the others have been ahead 
of me and all I could get was these two. One's 
a picture called I'eglise' and the other's 'la 
maison de Jeanne d'Arc' " 

The shops had hard work in keeping up 
with more commodities than picture postcards. 
There seemed to be an insatiable demand for 
canned peaches and sardines. Somehow or 
other men who have been on a long march 
simply crave either sardines or canned peaches. 
The doughboys did a good deal of eating at 
their own expense. Army food was plentiful 
and moderately varied. Beans and corned beef 
hash were served a good many times perhaps, 
but there was no lack of fresh meat and there 
was plenty of jam and of carrots and onions 

89 



THE A. E. F. 

and heavy gravy. Food, however, was an out- 
let for spending money and in some villages 
the men got so eager that they would buy any- 
thing. Little traveling shops in wagons came 
through the smaller villages in the northern 
part of the training area loaded with all sorts 
of gimcracks intended for the peasant trade. 
The peddlers had no time to put in a special 
line for the soldiers. They found that it was 
not necessary. Desperate men with pockets 
full of money would purchase even the imita- 
tion tortoise shell sidecombs which the itiner- 
ant merchants had to sell. 

The purchasing capacity of the soldier was 
not limited to his pay alone. The villagers 
were wildly excited about the white bread is- 
sued to the American army. It was the first 
they had seen since the second year of the war. 
One old lady seized a loaf which was pre- 
sented to her and crying "il est beau," sat 
down upon a doorstep and began to eat the 
bread as if it were cake. The rate of exchange 
fluctuated somewhat but there were days when 
a loaf of white bread could be exchanged for 
a, whole roast chicken. 

90 



SUNNY FRANCE 

The eagerness of the American soldier to 
spend his money had the result of tempting 
French storekeepers to raise their prices and 
as the cost of living mounted the civilian pop- 
ulation began to complain. Even the soldiers 
had suspicions at last that they were being 
charged too much in some stores and the 
American officers took over price control as 
another of their many responsibilities. 

"I went to the mayor," one town major ex- 
plained, "and I said, 'Look here, Bill, I don't 
mind 'the shopkeepers putting a little some- 
thing over. All I ask is that they just act 
reasonable. They'll get all the money in time 
anyhow, and so I wish you'd tip them off not 
to be in so much of a hurry.' He couldn't 
talk any English, that mayor couldn't, but the 
interpreter told him about it and he went right 
to the front for us. From that day to this 
we've had only one complaint about anything 
in our village. That came from an old lady 
who had some doughboys billeted in a barn 
next to the shed where she kept her sheep. 
She came to me and said the soldiers talked so 
much at night that the sheep couldn't sleep." 

91 



CHAPTER VII 

PERSHING 

Nobody will ever call him "Papa" Pershing. 
He is a stepfather to the inefficient and even 
when he is pleased he says little. In the mat- 
ter of giving praise the General is a homeo- 
path. For that reason he can gain enormous 
effect in the rare moments when he chooses to 
compliment a man or an organization. 
Pershing believes that discipline is the foun- 
dation 'of an army. 

"I think," said one young American officer, 
"that his favorite military leader is Joshua be- 
cause he made the sun and the moon stand at 
attention." In other words Pershing is a sol- 
diers' soldier. No man can strike such hard 
blows as he does and leave no scars. There 
are men here and there in the army who do 
not love him but their criticism almost invari- 
ably ends, "but I guess I'll have to admit that 
he's a good soldier." 

92 



PERSHING 

Pershing is not a disciplinarian merely for 
the sake of discipline but he believes that it 
is the gauge of the temper of any military or- 
ganization. His interest in detail is insatiable. 
He can read a man's soul through his boots 
or his buttons. Next to the Kaiser, Pershing 
hates nothing so much as rust and dust and 
dirt. Perhaps round shoulders should go in 
the list as well, and pockets. Certainly he 
makes good the things he preaches. There is 
no finer figure in any army in Europe. The 
General is fit from the tip of his glistening 
boots to his hat top. We saw him once after 
he had walked through a front line trench on 
a rainy day. There were sections of that 
trench where the mud was over a man's shoe- 
tops and the back area which had to be crossed 
before the trench system was reached was a 
great lake of casual water fed at its fringes by 
roaring rain torrents. And yet the general 
came out of the trench without a speck of mud 
on his boots in spite of the fact that he had 
plunged along with no apparent regard for his 
footing. 

There was dust behind him, though, on the 
93 



THE A. E. F. 

afternoon he first came to the training area to 
see his men. News reached our town that the 
general was up in the northern end of the 
training zone and moving fast. An officer 
passing by gave me a lift in his car and when 
we arrived at the next village half a dozen sol- 
diers who were sitting on a bench jumped up 
for dear life and jarred themselves to the very 
heels with the stiff est of military salutes. 

The officer grinned. "Pershing's in town," 
he said and so he was. 

We found him in a kitchen talking about 
onions to a cook. He asked each soldier in 
turn what sort of food he was getting. Some 
were too frightened to do more than mumble 
an inaudible answer. A few said, "Very good, 
sir." And one or two had complaints. The 
General listened to the complaints attentively 
and in each case pressed his questions so as to 
make the soldier be absolutely concrete in hir 
answers. Next he turned upon an officer and 
wanted to know just what the sewage system 
of the town was. The officer was a dashing 
major and he seemed ill at ease when Pershing 

94 



PERSHING 

asked how many days a week he inspected the 
garbage dump. 

"That isn't enough," said the General when 
the major answered. "I want you to pay 
more attention to those things." 

From the kitchen he went into every billet 
in the village. In two he climbed up the lad- 
ders to see what sort of sleeping quarters the 
men had in their lofts. In one billet a soldier 
stole a look over his shoulder at the General 
as he passed. Pershing turned immediately. 

"That's not the way to be a soldier," he said. 
"You haven't learned the first principle of be- 
ing a soldier." He turned to a second lieu- 
tenant. "This man doesn't stand at attention 
properly," he explained. "I want you to 
make him stand at attention for five minutes." 

The next offender was a captain who had 
one hand in his pocket while giving an order. 
The General spoke to him just as severely as 
he had to the enlisted man. Then i_e was into 
his car and away to the next village. 

Pershing is always on the move. One of 
his aides told me that he never had more than 
five minutes' notice of where the General was 

95 



THE A. E. F. 

going or how long he would stay. No man in 
the army has covered so much territory as 
Pershing. He has been in practically every 
village occupied by the American troops. He 
has inspected every hospital and every train- 
ing camp. One day he will be at a port look- 
ing at the accommodations which are being 
made for incoming vessels and on the next he 
will have jumped from the base to a front line 
trench. He has been on all the Western 
fronts except the Italian. His French and 
British and Belgian hosts find him a most am- 
bitious guest. He wants to see everything. 
Once while observing a French offensive he ex- 
pressed a desire to go forward and see a line 
of trenches which had just been captured from 
the Germans. The French tried to dissuade 
him but the General complained that he could 
not see just how things were going from any 
other position and so into the German trench 
he went. 

Pershing has developed in France. Like 
every other man in the American army he has 
had to study modern warfare, but more than 
that he has caught something of the spirit of 

96 



PERSHING 

the French. He has acquired some of their 
ability to put a gesture into command, to util- 
ize personality in the inspiration of troops. 
He is not yet the equal of the French in this 
respect. Joffre, for instance, fully realized 
the military usefulness of his enormous popu- 
larity and capitalized it. It was not mere 
luck that he became a tradition. Petain, 
while by no means the equal of Joffre on the 
personal side, knows how to talk to soldiers 
and to townsfolk and to make himself a big 
human force. 

While he is. still a homeopath. General 
Pershing realizes more than he ever did before 
the value of a pat on the back given at the 
right time. I saw him do one of those little 
gracious things in a base hospital which was 
caring for the first American wounded. A 
youthful doughboy was lying flat on his back 
wondering just how long it was going to be 
before supper time came round when all of a 
sudden there was a clatter at the door. The 
doughboy was afraid it was going to be some 
more nurses and doctors. They had bothered 
him a lot by bandaging up his arm every little 

97 



THE A. E. F. 

while and it hurt, but when he looked up at 
the foot of his bed there stood the man with 
four stars on his shoulders. The little dough- 
boy grinned a bit nervously. He thought it 
was funny that he should be lying on his back 
and General Pershing standing up. 

The General was somewhat nervous and em- 
barrassed, too. He still lacks a little of the 
French feeling for the dramatic in the doing 
of these little things. He had to clear his 
throat once and then he said, "I want to con- 
gratulate you. I envy you. There isn't a 
man in the army who wouldn't like to be in 
your place. You have brought home to the 
people of America the fact that we are in the 
war." 

The doughboy didn't say anything, but the 
nurse who made the rounds that evening won- 
dered why a patient who was doing so well 
should have a pulse hitting up to ninety-six. 

Earlier in the summer General Pershing en- 
countered some far more embarrassing tests. 
He had to handle bouquets. The donor was 
usually a French girl and a very little one. 
When Pershing and Petain made a joint trip 

98 



PERSHING 

through the American army zone there were 
two little girls and two bouquets in each vil- 
lage. General Petain, after receiving his bou- 
quet, would bend over gracefully and kiss the 
little gii^l, adding one or two kindly phrases 
immediately following "ma petite." General 
Pershing began by patting the little girls on 
the head, but he realized it was not enough and 
after a bit he began to kiss them, too; only 
once or twice he got tangled up in their hats 
and found it hard to maintain military dig- 
nity. He handled the flowers gingerly. He 
seemed to regard each bouquet as a bomb 
which would explode in five seconds but each 
time there was some aide ready to step for- 
ward and relieve him. 

The attitude of the average West Pointer 
towards his men is generally speaking the same 
as that of General Pershing. Some observ- 
ers think the West Point attitude too strict, 
but I was inclined to believe that the men 
from the academy handled men better than 
the reserve officers. They are strict, it is true, 
but at the same time they have been trained 
to look after the needs of their men closely. 

99 



THE A. E. F. 

The trouble with the average reserve officer is 
that he has not had time to learn how much he 
must father his men and mother them, too, 
for that matter. He does not know probably 
just how dependent the average soldier is 
upon his officer. 

Perhaps the strictest officer of all is the man 
who was once a non-com. The former dough- 
boy knows the tricks of the enlisted man and 
he is determined that nobody shall put any- 
thing over on him. He is often just a little 
bit afraid that the soldiers are going to trade 
on the fact that he was once an enlisted man. 
I once saw a soldier offer some cigars to two 
officers. One of the officers was a West 
Pointer and he laughed and took a cigar but 
the former non-com. refused very sternly. He 
could not afford to be indebted to an enlisted 
man. 

I do not wish to imply that the men who 
come up from the ranks do not make good of- 
ficers. As a matter of fact they are among 
the best, once their preliminary self-conscious- 
ness has worn off. The transition from 
stripes to bars is perfect torture to some of 

100 



PERSHING 

them. One company had a crack soldier who 
had been a sergeant for seven years. He was 
recommended for promotion and was sent to 
an officers' training school in France. He did 
very well but just a week before he was to re- 
ceive his commission he succeeded in gaining 
permission to be dropped from the school and 
go back to his old company as sergeant. At 
the last minute he had decided that he did not 
want to be an officer. 

I watched him put a company through its 
drill two days after his return. They moved 
with spirit and precision under his commands 
but when it was all over I found one reason 
why he didn't want to be an officer. 

"That was very good today," he said. "You 
done well." 

The first lieutenant smiled. He had a 
right to smile, too, for the return of the ser- 
geant to his company had almost cut his work 
in half. He knew his value well enough. 

"The best I can do is teach the men," he 
said. "It takes an old sergeant to learn 
them." 



CHAPTER VIII 

MEN WITH MEDALS 

General Petain was the first of many fa- 
mous Frenchmen who came to see the Amer- 
ican troops in training. He also had the ad- 
ditional object of reviewing the chasseurs and 
of distributing medals, for this crack division 
had been withdrawn from one of the most ac- 
tive sectors to instruct the doughboys. Gen- 
eral Pershing accompanied Petain. The blue 
devils were drawn up in formation in the mid- 
dle of a big meadow cupped within hills. The 
seven men who were to be honored stood in a 
line in front of the division. Six were officers 
and they awaited the pleasure of the general 
with their swords held at attention. The sev- 
enth man who stood at the right of the little 
line was an old sergeant with a great flowing 
gray and white mustache. The rifle which he 
held in front of him overtopped him by at least 
a foot. 

102 



MEN WITH MEDALS 

The ceremony began with a fanfare by the 
trumpeters. As the last notes came tumbling 
back from the hills Petain moved forward. 
We found that he was not so tall as Pershing 
nor quite as straight. The French leader is 
also a little gray and about his waist there is 
just a suggestion of the white man's burden. 
But he is soldierly for all that and his eyes are 
marvelously keen and steady. His tailor de- 
served a decoration. The general wore only 
Dne medal, but that was as large as the badge 
I of a country sheriff. It was a great silver 
shield hung about his neck and indicated that 
he was a commander of the Legion of Honor. 
He stopped in front of the first officer in the 
little line waiting to be honored and spoke to 
him for a moment. Then he pinned a red rib- 
bon on his coat and kissed the man first on 
the left cheek and then on the right. The 
doughboys looked on in amazement. 

*'Well, I'll be damned," said one under his 
breath, *'it's true." 

Four men received the red ribbons, but the 
other three were down only for the military 
medal which is a high decoration but less es- 

103 



THE A. E. F. 

teemed than the Legion of Honor. No kisses 
went with the green and yellow ribbons of the 
military medal but only handshakes. Petain 
stopped in front of the old sergeant at the end 
of the line and looked at him for a minute 
without speaking. Then he called an orderly. 

"This man has three palms on his croix de 
guerre," said Petain. 

Now a palm means that soldier has been 
cited for conspicuous bravery in the report of 
the entire army. 

"The military medal is not enough for this 
man," continued Petain. "Step forward," he 
said. 

The old sergeant trembled a little as he 
stood a tiny, solitary gray figure in front of 
the whole division. 

"Bring back the trumpets," Petain com- 
manded and for the lone poilu the fanfare was 
sounded again. 

"I make you a chevalier of the Legion of 
Honor," said the commander in chief of the 
French army to the old sergeant, and after he 
had pinned the red ribbon to his breast he 
added a hug to the conventional two kisses. 

104 



MEN WITH MEDALS 

The poilu moved back to the ranks steadily, 
but as soon as the general had turned his back 
the sergeant pulled out his handkerchief and 
wept. The soldiers greeted their comrade 
with cheers and laughter. 

"Now," said Petain turning to Pershing, 
"let's take it easy for a little while. I've seen 
plenty of reviews." 

The French general walked across the space 
cleared for the review and began to talk with 
people in the fringe of spectators gathered 
around the edge of the meadow. He talked 
easily without any seeming condescension. 

"How are you, my little man?" he said, pat- 
ting a boy on the head. "In what military 
class are you?" 

Encouraged by his father the boy said that 
he was in the class of 1928. 

"Oh," said the general, "that's a long time 
off. We shall have beaten the Boches before 
then." 

Next it was a peasant girl who attracted his 
attention. 

"Where have you come from?" he inquired 
with as much apparent interest as if he were 

105 



THE A. E. F. 

talking with a soldier just back from Berlin. 
"That was a long walk just to see soldiers," 
he said when the girl told him that she lived in 
a little village about ten miles distant. "But 
we are glad to have you here," he added. 

And so he moved on down the line with 
handshakes for the grownups, pats on the head 
for little boys and kisses for little girls. He 
turned back to his reviewing station then and 
the French troops swept by with brave dis- 
play. They were very smart and brisk, horse, 
foot and artillery, but Petain found a few 
things to criticize although he mingled praise 
generously with censure. He told the officers 
to know their men and to get on such terms 
with them that the soldiers would not be 
afraid to speak freely. He told of reforms 
which he planned to introduce in the French 
army. He favored longer leaves from the 
front, he said, and better transportation for 
the poilus. 

"I shall have time tables made for the men 
on leave," he said and then for an instant he 
became the shrewd French business man 
rather than the dashing general. 

106 



MEN WITH MEDALS 

*'I have figured out," he explained, "that the 
army can afford to sell these time tables for 
five sous. It wouldn't do to give them away. 
Nobody would value them then." 

A week later we had another visitor. 
French generals and all their resplendent aides 
clicked their heels together and stood at atten- 
tion as this civilian passed by. He was a 
short stoutish man in blue serge knickerbock- 
ers and a dark yachting cap. His tailor de- 
served no decoration for this seemed a second- 
ary sort of costume and headgear in a group 
loaded down with gold braid and valor med- 
als. But their swords flashed for the man in 
the yachting cap and a great general saw him 
into his car, for the stoutish visitor was the 
President of the French Republic. Generals 
Petain and Pershing accompanied Poincare in 
his car up to the drill ground. It was an 
American division which marched this morn- 
ing. In fact it was the same unit which had 
marched through the streets of the port only a 
few months before. They had grown browner 
and straighter since that day and they looked 
taller. Group consciousness had dawned in 

107 



THE A. E. F. 

them now. The only lack of discipline was 
shown by the mules. It must be admitted that 
the mule morale left much to be desired. 
Many were new to the task of dragging ma- 
chine guns and those that did not sulk tried to 
run away. Strong arms and stronger words 
prevailed upon them. 

"Remember," the driver would plead, "you 
have a part in making the world safe for de- 
mocracy," and in a trice all the evil would flee 
from the eyes and the heels of the unruly ani- 
mals. 

A number of band^ helped to keep the men 
swinging into the face of a driving rain. The 
French officers who accompanied Petain and 
Poincare were somewhat surprised when one 
regiment went by to the tune of "Tannen- 
baum," but General Pershing explained that 
it had been played in America for years un- 
der the name of "Maryland, My Maryland." 
He had a harder task some minutes later when 
a band struck up a regimental hymn called 
"Happy Heinie," which borrows largely from 
"Die Wacht am Rhein" for its chorus. 

As soon as the troops marched by, General 
108 



MEN WITH MEDALS 

Pershing sent orders for all the officers to as- 
semble. They gathered in a great half cir- 
cle before the French President who spoke to 
them slowly and with much earnestness. In- 
deed, he spoke so slowly that fair scholars 
could follow his discourse. Even those who 
could grasp no more than such words as "La- 
fayette" and "President Wilson" and "la 
guerre" listened with apparent interest. M. 
Poincare called attention to the fact that the 
day was the anniversary of the Battle of the 
Marne and also the birthday of Lafayette. 
These days, he said, linked together the two 
nations which were making a common cause in 
the struggle for civilization and he ended with 
a dramatic sweep of his arm as he exclaimed, 
"Long live the free United States." How- 
ever, he called it Les Etats Unis which made 
it more difficult. 

"What did he say?" a group of doughboys 
asked a sergeant chauffeur who had been sta- 
tioned near enough to hear the speech. "I 
didn't get it all," said the sergeant, "but it 
sounded a good deal like 'give 'em hell.' " 

The President and his party spent the rest 
109 



THE A. E. F. 

of the afternoon inspecting the billets of the 
Americans. In one barn Poincare insisted on 
climbing- up a ladder to see the quarters at 
close range and as he climbed slowly and clum- 
sily it came to my mind that the presidential 
waist line, the knickerbockers and the yacht- 
ing cap were all symbols of the fact that 
France even in war was still a civil democracy. 
Still it must be admitted that the next civil- 
ian we saw was more warlike than any of the 
soldiers. The only military equipment worn 
by Georges Clemenceau was a pair of leather 
puttees which didn't quite fit, but he had eyes 
and eyebrows and a jaw which all combined to 
suggest pugnacity. He was not then pre- 
mier and indeed he had been in political re- 
tirement for some time, but he made a greater 
impression on the soldiers than any of our vis- 
itors because he spoke in English. It was on 
September 16, 1917, that Clemenceau saw 
American soldiers, but he had seen them once 
before and that was in Richmond in 1864 when 
Grant marched into the city. Clemenceau 
was then a school teacher in America. The 
old Frenchman watched the sons and grand- 

110 



MEN WITH MEDALS 

sons of those dead and gone fighters and ex- 
pressed the wish that he might see American 
troops once again when they marched into Ber- 
lin. 

The doughboys he saw in France were not 
the seasoned troops which swung by him on 
those dusty Virginia roads so many years ago, 
but in their hands were new weapons which 
might have turned the tide at Bull Run and 
changed Gettysburg from victory into a rout. 
Certainly Pickett would have never swept up 
to the Union lines if there had been machine 
guns such as those with which the rookies blis- 
tered the targets for the edification of the dis- 
tinguished guests and the bombs which sent 
the pebbles sky high might have given pause 
even to Stonewall Jackson. 

There were sports as well as military exer- 
cises in the program arranged for Clemen- 
ceau. There were footraces and a tug of war 
and boxing matches. In one of these Amer- 
ican blood was freely shed on French soil for 
a middleweight against whom the tide of bat- 
tle was turning butted his opponent and cut 
his forehead. 

Ill 



THE A. E. F. 

I did not see Joff re when he paid a visit to 
the army zone and reviewed the troops but he 
left a glamor for us all in our messroom where 
he had dinner with General Pershing. It was 
a reporterless dinner so it meant less to us 
than to Henriette who served the dinner for 
the two generals. Nothing much had ever 
happened to Henriette before. She looked 
like Jeanne d'Arc, but the only voices she ever 
heard cried, "L'eau chaude, Henriette," or 
"Hot water" or "CEufs" or "Eggs." And if 
they were not wanted right away they must 
be had "toute de suite." 

It was Henriette who brushed the boots and 
cleaned the dishes and swept the floors and 
every night she waited on peasants and ped- 
dlers and reporters. Once she had a major 
in the reserve corps. He was attached to the 
quartermaster's department. But on the his- 
toric night she stood at the right elbow of 
General JofFre and the left elbow of General 
Pershing. I was away at the time and the 
correspondents were telling me about it before 
dinner. While we were talking she came into 
the room with the roast veal and I said, "Hen- 

112 



MEN WITH MEDALS 

riette, they tell me that while I was away you 
waited upon Marshal Joffre and General 
Pershing." 

One of the men at the table made a warning 
gesture, but it was too late. Henriette put 
the hot veal down to cool on a side table and 
pointed to the seat nearest the window. A 
large man from a press association sat there 
but she looked through him and saw the hero 
of the Marne. "Marechal JofFre la," said 
Henriette. She turned to a nearer seat and 
pointing to the shrinking representative of the 
Chicago Tribune explained, ''General Pearsh- 
ing ici." 

One of the men rose from the table then and 
got the veal. Something was said about fried 
potatoes, but Henriette remained to tell me 
about the historic dinner. She admitted that 
she was very nervous at first. That was in- 
creased by the fact that General "Pearshing" 
ate none of his pickled snails. The Marechal 
had fifteen. The soup went well, Henriette 
said, and General Pearshing cheered her up 
enormously by his conduct with the mutton. 
The chicken was also a success. After the 

113 



THE A. E. F. 



chicken the generals held their glasses in the 
air and stood up. Henriette noticed that 
when Marechal Joffre stood up he was "gros 



comme une maison." 



As he left the room Marechal JofFre pinched 
her cheek but the mark was gone before she 
could show it to the cook. For all that Hen- 
riette had something to show that she waited 
upon generals at the famous dinner. She 
opened a new locket which she wore around 
her neck and took out a small piece of gilt 
paper. She would not let me touch it, but 
when I looked closely I saw that it had printed 
upon it "Romeo and Juliet." 

"It's the band off the cigar Pershing 
smoked at the dinner," explained one of the 
correspondents. Henriette put the treasure 
back in her locket and sighed. "Je suis tres 
contente," she said. 






CHAPTER IX 

LETTERS HOME 

The British army tells a story of a soldier 
who had been at the front for a year and a half 
without ever once writing home. This state 
of affairs was called to the attention of his 
officer who summoned the soldier and asked 
him if he had no relatives. The Tommy ad- 
mitted that he had a mother and an aunt. 

"I want you to go back to quarters," said 
the captain, "and stay there until you've writ- 
ten a letter. Then bring it to me." 

The soldier was gone for two hours and 
then he returned and handed the officer a sin- 
gle sheet of letter paper. His note read, 
"Dear Ma — This war is a blighter. Tell 
auntie. With love — Alfred." 

It was different in the American army. 
The doughboys wrote to their families to the 
second and third cousin. One soldier turned 
fifty-two letters over to his lieutenant for cen- 

115 



THE A. E. F. 

sorship in a single day. The men hardly 
seemed to need the suggestion posted on the 
wall of every Y. M. C. A. hut: "Remember 
to write to mother today." Of course it was 
not always mother. I came upon a couple of 
lieutenants one afternoon hard at work on an 
enormous batch of letters. It was originally 
intended that the chaplain should censor all 
the mail for the regiment but it was found that 
the task would be far beyond the powers of 
any one man. In time the job came to ab- 
sorb a large part of the energy of the junior 
officers. 

"This," said one of the officers, "is the fifth 
soldier who's written that 'our officers are 
brave, intelligent and kind !' I know I'm brave 
and intelligent, but I'm not so damned kind," 
and he ripped out half a page of over faithful 
description of the country. 

"The man I have here," said the second of- 
ficer, "has got a joke. He says, 'If I ever 
get home the Statue of Liberty will have to 
turn round if she ever wants to see me again.' 
It was all right the first time, but now I've got 
to his tenth letter and he's still using it." 

116 



LETTERS HOME 

It has been found that more than fifty per 
cent, of the mail sent home consists of love let- 
ters. The fact that they have to be censored 
does not cramp the style of the writers in the 
least. One letter was so ardent as to arouse 
admiration. "This man writes the best love 
letter I ever read," said a lieutenant, looking 
up. "The only trouble is that he's writing to 
five girls at once and he uses the same model 
every time. Two of the girls live in the same 
town at that." 

Most of the letters were cheerful. Some 
courageously so. One man who was near 
death from tuberculosis wrote home once a day 
recounting imaginary events which had hap- 
pened outside the walls of his hospital. In 
his letters he would send himself on long 
marches over the hills of France and describe 
the woods and meadows and plowed fields as 
they looked to him on bright mornings. He 
described in detail work which he was doing 
in bombing and the only complaint he ever 
made was on a day when he had coughed him- 
self to such weakness that he could hardly fin- 
ish his daily letter. He wrote to his mother 

117 



THE A. E. F. 

then and asked her to excuse the briefness of 
his note. He explained that he was pretty 
well fagged out from a long afternoon of bay- 
onet drill. 

The soldiers frequently commented on the 
kindliness of the French people and they were 
also fond of boasting, with perhaps doubtful 
justification, that they were already proficient 
in the French language. A few were desir- 
ous of giving the folk back home a thrill. One 
man working as company cook at a port in 
France, some three or four hundred miles 
from the firing line, wrote a weekly letter de- 
scribing all sorts of war activities. He made 
up air raids and heavy bombardments and 
fairly tore up the village in which he was liv- 
ing. Curiously enough he never made him- 
self conspicuous in these actions. According 
to the letters he was just there with the rest 
taking the "strafing" as best he could. 

The officer who censored his first warlike 
letter cut out all the imaginative flights, but 
two days later the soldier wrote another letter 
even more thrilling. He complained that it 

118 



LETTERS HOME 

was difficult to write because the explosion of 
big shells nearby made the house rock. 

The lieutenant called him up then and said, 
"You're writing a lot of lies home, aren't 
you?" 

"Yes, sir," said the soldier. 

"Well, what are you doing it for?" contin- 
ued the officer. 

The soldier shifted about in embarrassment 
and then he said, "Well, you see, sir, those let- 
ters are to my father. He went into the Un- 
ion army when he was sixteen and fought all 
through the last two years of the war. He 
lives in a little town in Ohio and the people 
there call him 'Fighting Bill' on account of 
what he did in the Civil War. Well, when I 
went away to this war he began to go round 
town and tell everybody that I was going to 
do fighting that would make 'em all forget 
about the Civil War. He used to say that I 
came of fighting stock and that I'd make 'em 
sit up and take notice. It would be pretty 
tough for him, sir, if I had to write home and 
say that I was cooking down in a town where 
you can't even hear the guns." 

119 



THE A. E. F. 

"That's all right," said the lieutenant, "but 
some of the people whoVe got sons in this regi- 
ment will be doing a lot of worrying long be- 
fore they have any need to." 

"No, sir," said the soldier, "my father don't 
know what regiment I'm with. I was trans- 
ferred when I got over here and the only ad- 
dress he's got is the military post office num- 
ber." 

"I don't know what to say in that case," 
replied the lieutenant. "It's a cinch you're 
not giving away any military information and 
I can't see how you're giving any aid and com- 
fort to the enemy. I guess you can go on 
with that battle stuff. Make the bombard- 
ments just as hard as you like, but keep the 
casualties light." 

In contrast to the attitude of the veteran 
back in Ohio was a letter which a captain re- 
ceived from the mother of one of his men. 

"My son is only nineteen," she wrote. "He 
has never been away from home before and it 
breaks my heart that he should be in France. 
It may sound foolish but I want to ask you a 
favor. When he was a little boy I used to 

120 



LETTERS HOME 

let him come into the kitchen and bake him- 
self little cakes. I think he would remember 
some of that still. Can't you use him in the 
bakery or the kitchen or some place so he 
won't have to be put in the firing line or in the 
trenches? I will pray for you, captain, and 
I pray to God we may have peace for all the 
world soon." 

The captain read the letter and then he 
burned it up. "If the rest of the men in the 
company heard of that they would jolly the 
life out of that boy," he said. But he sat 
down and wrote to the mother, "Your boy is 
well and I think he is enjoying his work. I 
cannot promise to do what you ask because 
your son is one of the best soldiers in my com- 
pany. We are all in this together and must 
share the dangers. I pray with you that there 
may be peace and victory soon." 

No complete story of America's part in the 
war will ever be written until somebody has 
made a collection and read thousands of the 
letters home. The doughboy is strangely in- 
articulate. He can't or he won't tell you how 
he felt when he first landed in France, or heard 

121 



THE A. E. F. 

the big guns or went to the trenches. He is 
afraid to be caught in a sentimental pose but 
this fear leaves him when he writes. In his 
letters he will pose at times. This is not un- 
common. Many a man who would never 
think of saying anything about "saving 
France" will write about it in rounded sen- 
tences. His deepest and frankest thoughts 
will come out in letters. 

Of course the censors stand between these 
makers of history and posterity. We must 
wait for our chronicles of the war because of 
the censor. The newspaper stories about our 
troops in France on their tremendous errand 
should ring like the chronicle of an old cru- 
sade, but it is hard for the chronicler to bring 
a tingle when he must write or cable "Rich- 
ard the deleted hearted." 

When a censor wants to kill a story he usu- 
ally says, "Don't you know that your story 
may possibly give information to the Ger- 
mans?" The correspondent then withdraws 
his story in confusion. Of course what he 
should answer is, "Very well, that story may 
give information to the Germans, but it will 

122 



LETTERS HOME 

also give information to the Americans and 
just now that is much more important." 

There are certain military reasons for not 
naming units and not naming individuals, but 
the war is not being fought by the army alone. 
If the country is to be enlisted to its fullest 
capacity it must have names. The national 
character cannot be changed in a few months 
or a year. The newspapers have brought us 
up on names. It is too much to expect that 
the folk back home can keep up on their toes 
if the men they know go away into a great 
silence as soon as they cross the ocean and are 
not heard of again unless their names appear 
in casualty lists. We can't do less for our 
war heroes than we have done for Ty Cobb 
and Christy Mathewson and Smokey Joe 
Wood. That is not only for the sake of the 
people back home, but for those at the front 
as well. They hke to know that people are 
hearing about them. It is not encouraging to 
them to receive papers and learn that "certain 
units have done something." Just as soon as 
possible they want to see the name of their 
regiment and of D company and K and F 

123 



THE A. E. F. 

and H. The English name their units after 
a battle and so must we. And we must have 
plenty of names. It helped Ty Cobb not a 
little in the business of being Ty that thou- 
sands of columns of newspaper space had built 
up a tradition behind him. When Joe Wood 
got in a hole it is more than probable that he 
realized that he must and would get himself 
out again because he was *'Smokey Joe." We 
must do as much for private Alexander Brown 
and corporal James Kelly, and for sergeants 
and major generals, too. We are not a folk 
who thrive on reticence. It is true that we 
like to blow our own horn but it must be re- 
membered that Joshua brought down a great 
fortress in that manner. The trumpets are 
needed for America. We cannot fight our 
best to the sound of muffled drums. 

The man abroad who is sending back the 
stories of the war must deal with the French 
censor as well as the American, and that re- 
minds us of Petain's mustache. When the 
great general came to our camp all the news- 
paper stories about his visit were sent to the 
French military censor. All were allowed to 

124 



LETTERS HOME 

pass in due course except one. The cor- 
spondent concerned went around to find out 
what was wrong. 

"I'm sorry," said the censor, "but I cannot 
allow this cable message to go in its present 
form. You have spoken of General Petain's 
white mustache. I might stretch a point and 
allow you to say General Petain's gray mus- 
tache, but I should much prefer to have you 
say General Petain's blonde mustache." 

"Make it green with small purple spots, if 
you like," said the correspondent, "but let my 
story go." 



CHAPTER X 

MARINES 

"They tell me," said a young marine in his 
best confidential and earnest manner, "that 
the Kaiser isn't afraid of the American army, 
but that he is afraid of the marines." 

The youngster was hazy as to the source of 
his information, but he never doubted that it 
was accurate. He felt sure that the Kaiser 
had heard of the marines. Weren't they "first 
to fight"? And if he didn't fear them yet, he 
would. At least he would when Company D 
got into action. 

No unit in the American army today has 
the group consciousness of the marines. It is 
difficult to understand just how this has hap- 
pened. Everybody knows that once a regi- 
ment, or a division, or even an army, has ac- 
quired a tradition, that tradition will live long 
after every man who established it has gone. 

126 



MARINES 

There is, for instance, the Foreign Legion of 
the French army. Thousands and thousands 
of men have poured through this organization. 
Sickness and shrapnel, the exigencies of the 
service and what not have swept the veterans 
away again and again, but it is still the For- 
eign Legion. Some of its new recruits will be 
negro horseboys who have missed their ships 
at one of the ports through overprotracted 
sprees; there will be a gentleman adventurer 
or two, and a fine collection of assorted ruf- 
fians. But in a month each will be a legion- 
ary. 

I saw an American negro in a village of 
France who had been a legionary until a 
wound had stiffened a knee too much to per- 
mit him to engage in further service. He was 
a shambling, shuffling, whining, servile negro, 
abjectly sure that some kind white gentleman 
would give him a pair of shoes, or at least a 
couple of francs. But he had the Croix de 
Guerre and the Medaille Militaire. He had 
not cringed while he was a legionary. 

The tradition of this organization, however, 
is based on battle service. The Legion has 

127 



THE A. E. F. 

seen all the hardest fighting. The tradition 
of our marines rests on something else. They 
have seen service, of course, but it has not been 
considerable. Their group feeling was at first 
sheerly defensive. There was a time when the 
marine was a friend of no one in the service. 
He was neither soldier nor sailor. Many of 
the marine officers were men who had been 
unable to get appointments at West Point or 
Annapolis, or, having done so, had failed to 
hold the pace at the academies. And so the 
spirit of the officers and the men was that they 
would show the army and the navy of just 
what stuff a marine was made. And they 
have. It is true that the army and the navy 
have ceased long since to look down upon the 
marine, but the pressure of handicap has been 
maintained among the marines in France just 
the same. 

It is largely accidental. For instance, 
when the American troops were first billeted 
in the training area the marines were placed 
at the upper end of the triangle miles fur- 
ther from the field of divisional maneuvers 
than any of their comrades. And so, if 

128 



MARINES 

JoiFre, or Petain, or Clemenceau, or Poin- 
care, or any of the others came to review the 
first American expeditionary unit, the marines 
had to march twenty-two miles in a day in ad- 
dition to the ground which they would cover 
in the review. Curiously enough, this did not 
inspire them with a hatred of the reviews, nor 
did they complain of their lot. They merely 
took the attitude that a few miles more or less 
made no difference to a marine. 

I remember a story a young officer told me 
about his first hike with the marines in France. 
They had eleven miles to do in the morning 
and as many more in the afternoon, after a 
brief review. The young officer appeared 
with a pair of light shoes with a flexible sole. 

"Look here," said the major, "you'd better 
put on heavier shoes." 

"I think these will suffice, sir," said the 
young lieutenant. "You see, they're modeled 
on the principle of an Indian moccasin — full 
freedom for the foot, you know." 

The major grinned. "Come around and 
see me this evening," he said, "and tell me what 
you think of the Indians." The man with the 

129 



THE A. E. F. 

moccasin style shoe did well enough until the 
company was in sight of the home village. 
Unfortunately, a halt was called at a point 
where a brook ran close to the road. 

The sight of the cool stream made the lieu- 
tenant's feet burn and ache worse than ever. 
*'I had just about made up my mind to turn 
my men over to the sergeant and limp home, 
after a crack at the brook," said the lieuten- 
ant, "when I heard one of the men say that 
he was tired. There was an old sergeant on 
him like a flash. He was one of the oldest 
men in the regiment. He had never voted the 
prohibition ticket and rheumatism was only 
one of his ailments, but he hopped right on the 
kid who said he was tired. *Where do you 
get off to be a marine?' he said. 'Why, we 
don't call a hike like this marching in the ma- 
rines. Look here.' And the old fellow did 
a series of jig steps to show that the march 
was nothing to him. 

"Well," said the young officer, "I didn't 
turn the men over to the sergeant and I didn't 
bathe my feet in the brook. I marched in 
ahead of them. You see, I thought to myself, 

130 



MARINES 

I guess my feet will drop off all right before 
I get there, but I can't very well stop. After 
all, I'm a marine." 

Even the Germans did their best to make 
the marines feel that they were troops apart 
from the others. Only one raid was at- 
tempted during the summer and then it was 
the village of the marines upon which a bomb 
was dropped. It injured no one and did ever 
so much to increase the pride of marines, who 
would remark to less fortunate organizations 
in the training area: *'What do you know 
about aeroplanes?" 

When it came time to dig practice trenches, 
other regiments were content to put in the bet- 
ter part of the morning and afternoon upon 
the work, but the marines went to the task of 
digging in day and night shifts. There was 
a Sunday upon which Pershing announced 
that he would inspect the American troops in 
their billets. Through some mistake or other 
he arrived in the camp of the marines eight 
hours behind schedule, but the men were still 
standing under arms without a sign of weari- 
ness when he arrived. Historical tradition 

131 



THE A. E. F. 

lent itself to maintaining the morale of the 
marines, for their village was once the site of 
a famous Roman camp and one of the men in 
digging a trench one day came across a seg- 
ment of green metal that the marines assert 
roundly was part of a Roman sword. In a 
year or two it will be sure to be identified as 
Cesar's. 

The marines were exclusive and original 
even in the matter of mascots. The dough- 
boys had dogs and cats and a rather mangy 
lion for pets but no other fighting organization 
in the world has an anteater. The marines 
picked Jimmy up at Vera Cruz and he began 
to prove his worth as a mascot immediately. 
He was with 'them when the city was taken. 
Later he stopped off at Hayti and aided in 
subduing the rebels. He is said to be the only 
anteater who has been through two campaigns. 
Army life has broadened Jimmy. He has 
learned to eat hardtack and frogs and corn- 
beef and pie and beetles and slum and ome- 
lettes. As a matter of fact Jimmy will eat 
almost anything but ants. Of course he 
wouldn't refuse some tempting morsel simply 

132 



MARINES 

because of the presence of ants, but he no 
longer finds any satisfaction in making an en- 
tire meal of the pesky insects. He won't for- 
age for them. Things like hardtack and pie, 
Jimmy finds, will stand still and give a hun- 
gry man a chance. Lack of practice has some- 
what impaired the speed of Jimmy and even 
if he wanted to revert to type it is probable 
that he could catch nothing but the older and 
less edible ants. Of course he does not want 
to go back to an ant diet. He feels that it 
would be a reflection on the hospitality of his 
friends, the marines. 

The marines are equally tactful. In spite 
of his decline as an entomologist Jimmy re- 
mains by courtesy an anteater and is always 
so termed when exhibited to visitors. He has 
two tricks. He will squeal if his tail is pulled 
ever so gently and he will demolish and put 
out burning cigars or cigarettes. The latter 
trick is his favorite. He stamps out the glow- 
ing tobacco with his forepaws and tears the 
cigar or cigarette to pieces. The stunt is no 
longer universally popular. The marine who 
dropped a hundred fl-anc note by mistake just 

133 



THE A. E. F. 

in front of Jimmy says that teaching tricks 
to anteaters is all foolishness. 

However, Jimmy has picked up a few 
stunts on his own account. It is not thought 
probable that any marine ever encouraged him 
in his habit of biting enlisted men of the regu- 
lar army and reserve officers. There is a be- 
lief that Jimmy works on broad general prin- 
ciples, and many marines fear that they will 
no longer be immune from his teeth if the dis- 
tinctive forest green of their organization is 
abandoned for the conventional khaki of the 
rest of the army. 

Some little time before the American troops 
first went into the trenches, the marines were 
scattered into small detachments for police 
duty. Many of them have since been brought 
together again. There is, of course, a good 
deal of stuff and nonsense in stories about sol- 
diers saying, "We want to get a crack at 
them," and all that, but it is literally and ex- 
actly true that the marines, both officers and 
men, were deeply disappointed when they 
could not go to the front with the others. Their 
professional pride was hurt. 

134 



MARINES 

Still they did not whine, but went about 
their traditional police work with vigor. I 
was in a base hospital one day when a dough- 
boy came in all gory about the head. "What 
happened to you?" a doctor asked. "A ma- 
rine told me to button up my overcoat," said 
the doughboy, "and I started to argue with 
him." 

There are not many American army songs 
yet, but the marines did not wait until the war 
for theirs. Most of it I have forgotten, but 
one of the stunning couplets of the chorus is: 

If the army or the navy ever gaze on heaven's 

scenes 
They will find the streets are guarded by United 

States Marines. 



CHAPTER XI 

FIELD PIECES AND BIG GUNS 

War seemed less remote in the artillery 
camp than in any other section of the Amer- 
ican training area for the roar of the guns 
filled the air every morning and they sounded 
just as ominous as if they were in earnest. 
They were firing in the direction of Germany 
at that, but it was a good many score of miles 
out of range. Just the same the French were 
particular about the point. "We always 
point the guns toward Germany even in prac- 
tice if we can," said a French instructing offi- 
cer, "it's just as well to start right." 

The camp consisted of a number of brick 
barracks and the soldiers and officers were well 
housed. It was located in wild country, 
though, where it was possible to find ranges up 
to twelve thousand yards. Scrubby woods 
covered part of the ranges and the observation 

136 



FIELD PIECES AND BIG GUNS 

points towered up a good deal higher than 
would be safe at the front. We went through 
the woods the morning after our arrival and 
heard a perfect bedlam of fire from the guns. 
There was the sharp decisive note of the sev- 
enty-five which speaks quickly and in anger 
and the more deliberate boom of the one hun- 
dred and fifty-five howitzer. This was a 
colder note but it was none the less ominous. 
It had an air of premeditated wrath about it. 
The shell from the seventy-five might get to 
its destination first but the one hundred and 
fifty-five would create more havoc upon ar- 
rival. A sentry warned us to take the left 
hand road at a fork in the woods and presently 
we came upon one of the observation towers. 
It was crammed with officers armed with field 
glasses. Every now and then they would 
write things on paper. They seemed like so 
many reporters at a baseball game recording 
hits and errors. When we got to the top of 
the tower we found that large maps were part 
of the equipment as well as field glasses. 
These were wonderfully accurate maps with 
every prominent tree and church spire and 

137 



THE A. E. F. 

house top indicated. The officers were rang- 
ing from the maps. The French theory of ar- 
tillery work was not new to the American of- 
ficers, but this was almost the first chance they 
had ever had to work it out for we have no 
maps in America suitable for ranging. 

According to theory the battery should first 
fire short and then long and then split the 
bracket and land upon the target or there- 
abouts. The men had not been working long 
and they were still a little more proficient in 
firing short or long than in splitting the 
bracket. Later the American artillery gave 
a very good account of itself at the school. 
The French instructors told one particular 
battery that they were able to fire the seventy- 
five faster than it had ever been fired in France 
before. Perhaps there was just a shade of the 
over-statement of French politeness in that, 
but it was without doubt an excellent battery. 
In the lulls between fire could be heard the 
drone of aeroplanes for a number of officers 
were flying to learn the principles of aerial ob- 
servation in its uses for fire control. Turning 
around we could also see a large captive bal- 

138 



FIELD PIECES AND BIG GUNS 

loon. All the junior officers were allowed to 
express a preference as to which branch of ar- 
tillery work they preferred and, although ob- 
servation is the most dangerous of all, fully 
seventy-five per cent, of the men indicated it 
as their choice. 

Some American officers in other sections of 
the training area came to the conclusion in 
time that we should go to the English for in- 
struction in some of the phases of modern war- 
fare. We did in fact turn to the English 
finally for bayonet instruction and a certain 
number of officers thought that the English 
would also be useful to us in bombing, but I 
never heard any question raised but that we 
must continue to go to the French for instruc- 
tion in field artillery until such time as we had 
schools of our own. 

The difference in language made occasional 
difficulties of course. "It took us a couple of 
days to realize that when our instructor spoke 
of a *r anger rang' he meant a range error/ " 
said one American officer, "but now we get on 
famously." 

We left the men in the tower with their 
139 



THE A. E. F. 

maps and their glasses and went down to see 
the guns. Our guide took us straight in front 
of the one hundred and fifty-fives while they 
were firing, which was safe enough as they 
were tossing their shells high in the air. It 
was better fun, though, to stand behind these 
big howitzers, for by fixing your eye on a point 
well up over the horizon it was passible to see 
the projectile in flight. The shell did not seem 
to be moving very fast once it was located. It 
looked for all the world as if the gunners were 
batting out flies and this was the baseball 
which was sailing along. 

The French officer who was showing us 
about said that he could see the projectile as 
it left the mouth of the gun, but though the 
rest of us tried, we could see nothing but the 
flash. Later we stood behind the seventy-fives 
but since their trajectory is so much lower it 
is not possible to see the shell which they fire. 
They seemed to make more noise than the big- 
ger guns. Fortunately it is no longer con- 
sidered bad form to stick 3^our fingers in your 
ears when a gun goes off. Most of the officers 
and men in this particular battery were as 

140 



FIELD PIECES AND BIG GUNS 

careful to shut out the sound of the cannon as 
schoolgirls at a Civil War play. Not only did 
they stuff their fingers in their ears, but they 
stood up on their toes to lessen the vibration. 

Guns have changed, however, since Civil 
War days. They are no longer drab. Camou- 
flage has attended to that. The guns we saw 
were streaked with red and blue and yellow 
and orange. They were giddy enough to have 
stood as columns in the Purple Poodle or any 
of the Greenwich Village restaurants. 

Before we left the camp we met Major Gen- 
eral Peyton C. March, the new chief of staff, 
who was then an artillery officer. We agreed 
that he was an able soldier because he told us 
that he did not believe in censorship. Regard- 
ing one slight phase of the training he bound 
us to secrecy, but for the rest he said: "You 
may say anything you like about my camp, 
good or bad. I believe that free and full re- 
ports in the American newspapers are a good 
thing for our army." 

We traveled many miles from the field gun 
school before we came to the camp of the 
heavies. This, too, was a French school which 

141 



THE A. E. F. 

had been partially taken over by the Amer- 
icans. The work was less interesting here, for 
the men were not firing the guns yet, but 
studying their mechanism and going through 
the motions of putting them in action. Many 
of the officers attached to the heavies were 
coast artillerymen and there was a hberal 
sprinkling of young reserve officers who had 
come over after a little preliminary training at 
Fortress Monroe. The General in charge of 
the camp told us that these new officers would 
soon be as good as the best because the most 
important requirement was a technical educa- 
tion and these men had all had college scien- 
tific training or its equivalent. Just then they 
were all at school again cramming with all the 
available textbooks about French big guns. 
They did not need to depend on textbooks 
alone, for the camp contained types of most 
styles of French artillery. 

The pride of the contingent was a monster 
mounted on railroad trucks. It fired a pro- 
jectile weighing 1800 pounds. After the 
French custom, the big howitzer had been hon- 

142 



FIELD PIECES AND BIG GUNS 

ored by a name. "Mosquito" was painted on 
the carriage in huge green letters. 

"We call her mosquito," explained a French 
officer, "because she stings." 

"Mosquito" had buzzed no less than three 
hundred times at Verdun, but she had a nimi- 
ber of stings left. The Americans detailed 
with the gun were loud in its praises and as- 
serted that it was the finest weapon in the 
world. There were other guns, though, which 
had their partisans. Some swore by "Petite 
Lulu," a squat howitzer, which could throw a 
shell high enough to clear Pike's Peak and still 
have something to spare. There were cham- 
pions also of "Gaby," a long nosed creature 
which outranged all the rest. Marcel could 
talk a little faster than any gun in camp, but 
her words carried less weight. 

All the menial work about the camp was 
done by German prisoners. I was walking 
through the camp one day when I saw a little 
tow-headed soldier sitting at the doorstep of 
his barracks watching a file of Germans shuf- 
fle by. They were men who had started to war 

143 



THE A. E. F. 

with guns on their shoulders, but now they car- 
ried brooms. 

"Do you ever speak to the German prison- 
ers?" I asked the soldier. 

"Oh, yes," said the youngster; "some of 
them speak English, and they say 'Hello' to 
me and I say 'Hello' back to them. I feel 
sorry for them." 

The little soldier looked at the shabby pro- 
cession again and then he leaned over to me 
confidentially and said with great earnestness 
as if he had made up the phrase on the spot: 
"You know I have no quarrel with the Ger- 
man people." 

When we got home after our trips to the 
artillery camps we found an old man in a 
French uniform eagerly waiting to see us. He 
told us that he was an American, and more 
than that, a Californian. His name was 
George La Messneger and he was sixty-seven 
years old. He was French by birth and had 
fought in the Franco-Prussian war, but the 
next year he went to California and lived in 
Los Angeles until the outbreak of the great 
war. Although more than sixty, La Mess- 

144 



FIELD PIECES AND BIG GUNS 

neger was accepted by a French recruiting of- 
ficer and he was in Verdun two weeks after he 
arrived in France. Three days later he was 
wounded and when we met him he had added 
to his adventures by winning a promotion to 
sous-Heutenant and gaining the croix de guerre 
and the medaille mihtaire. 

Old George came to be a frequent visitor, 
but though we urged him on he would never 
tell us much about the war. He wanted to 
talk about California. 

"I tell the men in my regiment," George 
would begin, "that out in Los Angeles we cut 
alfalfa five times a year, but they won't believe 
me." 

Gently we tried to lead George back to the 
war and his experiences. "How did you get 
the military medal, lieutenant?" somebody 
asked. 

"Oh, that was at Verdun," replied the old 
man. 

"It must have been pretty hot up there," 
said another correspondent. 

"Yes," said George, and he began to muse. 
We imagined that he was thinking of those 

145 



THE A. E. F. 

hot days in February when all the guns, big 
and little, were turned loose. 

"Yes," said George, "it was pretty hot," and 
we drew our chairs closer. "You know," con- 
tinued the old man, "a lot of people will tell 
you that Los Angeles is hot. Don't pay any 
attention to them. I've lived there forty years, 
and I've slept with a blanket pretty much all 
the time. The nights are always cool." 

I had heard George before and I knew that 
he was gone for the evening now. As I tip- 
toed out of the room the old soldier in French 
horizon blue was just warming up to his fa- 
vorite topic. "San Francisco's nothing," said 
George, dismissing the city with as much scorn 
as if it had been Berlin or Munich. He talked 
with such vehemence that all his medals rat- 
tled. 

"We're nearer the Panama Canal," said 
George, "we're nearer China and Japan, and 
as for harbors " 

But just then the door closed. 



CHAPTER XII 

OUR AVIATORS AND A FEW OTHERS 

At first the ace is low. Our young aviators 
who will be among the most romantic heroes 
of them all begin humbly on the ground. The 
American army now has the largest flying field 
in France for its very own, but during the 
sunMner and early autumn many of our men 
trained in the French schools. There his 
groundling days try the aviator's dignity. He 
must hop before he can fly and perhaps "hop" 
is too dignified a word. When we visited one 
of the biggest schools, all the new pupils were 
practicing in a ridiculous clipped wing Bleriot 
called a penguin. This machine was a ground- 
hog which scurried over the earth at a speed 
of twenty or thirty miles an hour. It never 
left the grass tops and yet it provided a cer- 
tain amount of excitement for its pilot, or 
maybe rider would be better. 

147 



THE A. E. F. 

The favorite trick of the penguin is to turn 
suddenly in a short half circle and collapse on 
its side. It takes a good deal of skill to keep 
it straight and when the aviator has learned 
that much he is allowed to make a trip in a 
machine which leaps a little in the air every 
now and then, only to flop to earth again. 
Then he is ready to fly a Bleriot, though, of 
course, his first trips are made as a passen- 
ger. Very little time is spent in flying. Stay- 
ing up in the air is no great trick. It's the 
coming down which gives the trouble. And so 
the student is eternally trying landings. He 
smashes a good many machines and here the 
French show their keen realization of the men- 
tal factor in flying. 

"I made a bad landing one day," an Amer- 
ican student named Billy Parker told me, *'and 
smashed my machine up good and proper. I 
thought I'd killed myself, but they dragged me 
out from under the junk, picked the pieces of 
wood and aluminum out of my head, stuffed 
some cotton into my nose to check the bleed- 
ing and in fifteen minutes they had a new ma- 
chine out and had me up in the air again." 

148 



OUR AVIATORS AND A FEW OTHERS 

Parker said he felt a bit queer when he got 
up in the air again. "I had a sort of feeling 
that I belonged down on the ground and not 
up there," he said. "That was peculiar be- 
cause usually the air feels very stable and 
friendly. You hate to come down, but this 
time I was anxious to get back and after cir- 
cling the field once I came down. My land- 
ing was all right, too, and since then I've never 
had that scared feeling about the air." 

The French theory is that the mistake must 
be corrected immediately. The man who has 
had a smash-up is apt to get air shy if he has a 
chance to brood over his mishap for a day or 
two. 

The last test of the preliminary school is a 
thirty mile flight with three landings. After 
he has done that the student goes to Pau for 
his test in acrobatics. The chief stunt set for 
him here is a vrille. The student is required to 
put his machine into a spin at a height of about 
3500 feet and bring it out again. The trick 
; is not particularly difficult if the man keeps his 
head, but the tendency is to turn on the power 
which only accelerates the fall and some are 

149 



THE A. E. F. 

killed at Pau. My friend caught malaria as 
soon as he got there and was allowed to take 
things easily for a week. Finally his test was 
set for Wednesday. On Monday morning the 
man who slept in the cot to his left went out 
for his test and was killed and on Tuesday the 
man from the right hand cot was killed. Death 
came very close to the young American. He 
and a French student arrived at the training 
ground at about the same time. Two machines 
were ready. The instructor hesitated a second 
and then assigned the American to the ma- 
chine at the right. A few minutes later the 
Frenchman was killed when a wing came off 
his machine as soon as he began his vrille. For- 
tunately Parker did not know that until after 
he had passed his ov/n test. He saw one other 
man killed before he left Pau and that hor- 
rified him more than the accident on the morn- 
ing of his trial. 

**The judge who decided whether you passed 
your test was a little Frenchman with a mon- 
ocle," he said. "He sat in a rocking chair 
at the edge of the field and you had to do the 
vrille straight in front of him or it didn't count. 

150 



OUR AVIATORS AND A FEW OTHERS 

He simply wouldn't turn to look at a flyer. I 
was standing beside him when one fellow got 
rattled in the middle of a vrille and put his 
power on. Even at that he ahnost lifted his 
machine out but she came down too fast for 
him. There was a big smash-up and people 
came running out to the wreck. They sent for 
a doctor and then for a priest, but the terrible 
little man never moved from his chair. 'You 
see,' he cried to me, 'he was stupid! stupid!' 
This flying test had come to seem nothing more 
than an examination bluebook to him. A fel- 
low passed or he flunked and that was all there 

was to it." 

Luck plays its biggest part in a flier's early 
days at the front. He has a lot to learn after 
he gets there, but the French do not nurse him 
along much. He has to take his chances. It 
may be that he will get in some very tight place 
before he has learned the fine pomts and a 
future star will be lost at the outset of his 
career. On the other hand he may come up 
against German fliers as green as himself and 
gradually gain a technique before he is called 
upon to face an enemy ace or a superior com- 

151 



THE A. E. F. 

bination of planes. At the front as in the 
schools the French pay keen attention to the 
mental state of the fliers. 

"There was always champagne at mess and 
they kept the graphophone playing all through 
dinner any night a man from our squadron 
didn't come back," an aviator said to me. "One 
afternoon we lost two men and before dinner 
they took a leaf out of the table. Our com- 
mander didn't want us to notice any empty 
seats or the extra space." 

It is difficult to say which nation has the 
most daring aviators, but that honor prob- 
ably belongs to the English. I asked a 
Frenchman about it and he said: "The Eng- 
lish do most of the things you would call 
stunts. There was one, for instance, that made 
a landing on a German aviation field and after 
firing a few rounds at the aerodrome flew away 
again. That was a stunt. But we think the 
English are fools with their sportsmanship and 
all that. It doesn't work now. We look at it 
a little differently. We cannot take fool 
chances. If you take a fool chance you are 
very likely to get killed. That is not nice, of 

152 



OUR AVIATORS AND A FEW OTHERS 

course. We do not like to be killed, but moro 
than that, it is one less man for France. We 
must wait until there is a fair show." 

"And when is that?" I asked. 

"When there are not more than four Ger- 
mans against you," said the careful French- 
man. 

The warlike spirit of the French aviators 
extended even to the servants at the prelimin- 
ary school which we visited. The Americans 
there were all quartered in one big room and 
their general man of all work was a little An- 
namite from French-Indo-China. Hy seemed 
the most peaceful member of a peace-loving 
race as he moved about the barracks just be- 
fore dawn every morning waking up the stu- 
dents with Sir smiling "Bon jour" and an 
equally good-natured "Cafe." One day he had 
a holiday and after borrowing a uniform he 
went to a photographer's in the nearest town. 
From the photographer he borrowed a rifle, a 
cutlass and a pistol. He thrust the cutlass into 
his belt and shouldered the other two weapons. 
After he had assumed a fighting face the pic- 
ture was taken. 

153 



THE A. E. F. 

The next day Hy varied the routine. He 
began with "Bon jour" as usual, but before he 
said "Cafe" he drew from behind his back the 
photograph, and pointing to it proudly, ex- 
claimed, "brave soldat." 

We went from the French school to the big 
field where the American camp was under con- 
struction. The bulk of the work was being 
done by German prisoners. One of these, a 
sergeant, had been a well known architect in 
Munich. The American workers consulted 
him now and then in regard to some building 
problem and he always gave them good advice. 
He took almost a professional pride in the 
growing buildings even if they were designed 
to house the men who will one day be the eyes 
of the American army. We asked another 
prisoner how he got along with the Americans 
and he replied: "Oh, some of them aren't half 
bad." A third spoke to us in meager broken 
English, although he said that he had lived five 
years in Buffalo. "Are you going back to 
Germany after the war?" we asked him. 
"Nein," he replied decisively, "Chicago." 

Most prisoners professed to be confident 
154 



OUR AVIATORS AND A FEW OTHERS 

that Germany would win the war and they all 
based their faith on the submarine. As we 
started to go the man from Buffalo suddenly 
held out his hand and said: "So long." Sev- 
eral of the correspondents shook hands with 
him much to the horror of a young American 
in the French flying corps who accompanied 
us. 

"You mustn't do that," he explained. "Any 
Frenchman who saw you do that would be very 
much shocked." 

I remembered then that when I saw German 
prisoners in any of the large towns the French 
inhabitants took great pains to ignore them. 
I never heard French people jeer at their pris- 
oners. Their attitude was one of complete 
aloofness. Once I saw prisoners in a big rail- 
road station and the crowds swept by on either 
side without a glance as if these men from 
Prussia had been so many trunks or trucks or 
benches. 

If the young Americans at the school had 
not been so busy learning the business of fly- 
ing they could have formed a cracker jack nine 

155 



THE A. E. F. 

or eight or eleven, as the squad included some 
of the most famous of our college athletes. 

We also visited an English aerodrome which 
was not far from our headquarters. This was 
a camp from which planes started for raids into 
Germany. The men who were carrying on this 
work were all youngsters. I saw no one who 
seemed to be more than twenty-five. Just the 
day before we arrived the Geraians had dis- 
covered their whereabouts and had raided the 
hangars. One man had been killed and two 
planes wrecked. Machine gun bullets had left 
holes in all the buildings about the place. The 
English officer smiled when we looked about. 
"Oh, yes," he said, "the Hun was over last 
night and gave us a bit of a bounce." His 
slang was fluent but puzzling. He was ex- 
plaining why he and his fellow aviators flew at 
a certain height on raids. "You see," he saidr 
"the Hun can't get his hate up as far as that.'* 

The bombing machines of the squadron were 
huge, powerful planes, but they all had pet 
names painted upon them such as "Bessie" and 
"Baby" and "Winifred" which had been twice 
to Stuttgart. These English fliers were a 

156 



OUR AVIATORS AND A FEW OTHERS 

quiet, reticent crowd who became fearfully em- 
barrassed if anybody tried to draw them out 
on the subject of their exploits. One of them 
went over to an American Red Cross hospital 
nearby a few days after our visit and played 
bridge with three American doctors there. He 
had been a rather frequent visitor and a keen 
and eager player, so they were somewhat sur- 
prised when he told them at nine o'clock that 
he would have to go. He was three francs be- 
hind and started to fumble around in his 
pockets to find the change. "Oh, never mind," 
said one of the doctors. "Some other night 
will do. You'll be over here again pretty soon, 
I hope." 

"Oh, no," said the young Englishman, "I'd 
rather pay up now. Sorry to toddle off so 
early. Beastly nuisance, you know, but I've 
got to go over and bomb Metz to-night." 

Much more would be heard of the flying ex- 
ploits of the English if their individual reti- 
cence were not combined with a governmental 
policy of not announcing the names of the 
fliers who bring down enemy planes. Unfor- 
tunately, the American army seems prepared 

157 



THE A. E. F. 

to follow this example. One of the high of- 
ficers in the American air service in France 
said that he did not intend to treat aviators 
like prima donnas. He added that he thought 
it was a big mistake to advertise aces. How- 
ever, the Germans play up their star airmen in 
the newspapers and on the moving picture 
screen and it must be admitted that they have 
not made many mistakes from a purely mili- 
tary point of view. 

Inevitably, however, the status of the flier is 
changing. Nobody regrets this more than the 
aviators of France. The French army used to 
have a saying, "all aviators are a little crazy," 
and nobody believed it so thoroughly as the 
aviators. They took great pride in being un- 
like other people in a war which was all 
cramped up into schedule. An aviator got up 
when he felt like it and flew when the mood 
was on. If he felt depressed, or unlucky, or 
out of sorts, he rolled over and went to sleep 
again. Nobody said anything about it. When 
he fought the battle was a duel with an op- 
ponent who was also a knight and sportsman 
although a Boche. 

158 



OUR AVIATORS AND A FEW OTHERS 

But there was no keeping efficiency out of 
the air. The German brought it there. He 
discovered that two planes were better than 
one and three even better. He introduced 
teamwork and the lone French errants of the 
air began to be picked off by groups of Ger- 
mans who would send one machine after an- 
other diving down on a single foe. The Fly- 
ing Circus and other aerial teams of the Ger- 
mans have not only driven chivalry from the 
air, but they have taken a good deal of the 
joy out of flying. Very reluctantly the 
French have adopted squadron flying and the 
airman now finds himself obeying commands 
just as if he were an infantryman or an artil- 
lerist. Even the civilian population has begun 
to show that it realized the change in the status 
of the aviator. There was, for instance, poor 
Navarre, the finest flier in the army, who was 
sent to prison because he came to Paris on a 
spree and ran down three gendarmes with his 
racing auto. French aviators cannot see the 
sense of punishing Navarre. I only heard one 
aviator who had any excuse to off*er for the 
civilian authorities. 

159 



THE A. E. F. 

"After all," he said, "they showed a little 
judgment. They did not arrest Navarre un- 
til he had run down three gendarmes." 

Although many men in the army have 
longer lists of fallen Germans to their credit, 
no Frenchman has ever flown with the grace 
and skill of Navarre. The great Guynemer 
was only a fair flier and owed his success to his 
skill as a gunner. But Navarre was master of 
all the tricks. Upon one occasion he bet a com- 
panion that he could make a landing on an 
army blanket. The blanket was duly fastened 
in the middle of the field and away flew the 
aviator. His preliminary calculation was just 
a bit ofl* and at the last minute he nosed 
sharply down and wrecked the machine. But 
he hit the blanket and won the bet. 

Next to Germany, America has done most 
to take romance out of the air, so the French- 
men say. The American air student attends 
lectures and learns about meteorology and 
physics. He learns how to take a motor apart 
and put it together again. In fact, he is versed 
in all the theory of flying long before he is al- 
lowed to venture in the air. Of course this is 

160 



OUR AVIATORS AND A FEW OTHERS 

the best system. It would be the system of 
any nation which had the opportunity of tak- 
ing its time, yet the scholarly approach can- 
not fail to dim adventure a little bit. Launce- 
lot would have been a somewhat less dashing 
knight if he had begun his training in chivalry 
by learning the minimum number of foot 
pounds necessary to unhorse an opponent or 
the relative resilience of chain mail and armor. 
Yet not all the training in the world can take 
the stunt spirit out of the young American 
aviator. One who shipped as a passenger with 
a Frenchman bound for a bombing raid, paid 
for his passage by crawling out along the fusel- 
age of the machine to release a bomb which had 
stuck. But it was a little incident back of the 
lines which gave me the best insight into the 
character of the American aviator. I know a 
young aviator of twenty-five who is already 
a major and the commander of a squadron. 
He wasn't particularly old for his years, either. 
I remember he told us with great glee how he 
and another young aviation officer had nailed 
the purser in his cabin one night during the 
trip across. Yet he could be stern upon oc- 

161 



THE A. E. F. 

casion. He was walking along the field one 
day when he saw a plane looping. He was 
surprised because the French instructor at- 
tached to the squadron had told them that the 
type of machine which they were using would 
not do the loop the loop. It didn't have suf- 
ficient power, he said, nor would it stand the 
strain. 

"It made five loops," said the major in tell- 
ing the story, "and they were dandies, too, as 
good as I ever saw. I thought it was the 
Frenchman, of course, but I asked somebody 
and he said, 'No, it's Harry.' When he came 
down I bawled him out. 'You were told not 
to do that, weren't you ?' I asked him. He said, 
'Yes, sir.' 'Well, what did you do it for?' I 
asked him. 'I guess it was because the French- 
man told me it was impossible,' he said. I told 
him that he would have to turn his machine 
over to another man and that other disciplin- 
ary measures would be applied. He's in dis- 
grace still and I suppose I've got to keep it up 
for a while. That's all right, good discipline 
and all that sort of thing, you know, but there's 
one thing I can't take away from him, and no- 

162 



OUR AVIATORS AND A FEW OTHERS 

body else can. He's the only man in France 
that ever looped that type of machine. He did 
it. By golly, I envy him, but I don't dare let 
him know it." 



CHAPTER XIII 

HOSPITALS AND ENGINEERS 

Some of the compliments the mannerly 
French poured out upon the army left the 
Americans feeling that they didn't quite de- 
serve them. Others they could take standing. 
Well to the front of the second lot were all 
the good words for the medical corps A 
leading writer for a big Parisian afternoon 
paper took the first three columns of his first 
page to say with undisguised emotion that the 
French government not merely could, with 
profit, but should and must pattern after the 
American Army Medical Service. 

One good army hospital in France is like 
another and so let it be the New York Post 
Graduate unit which was picked at random 
for the purpose of a visit. We straggled off 
the train with two old peasant women whose 
absorbed faces under their peaked white caps 

164 



HOSPITALS AND ENGINEERS 

did not encourage us to ask our way of them, 
and one poilu, bent under the astonishing mis- 
cellany of the home-going French soldier. He 
lost his chance to escape us by eyeing us with 
frank if friendly curiosity. Could he direct 
us to the American Army Hospital, we asked, 
and he wrinkled his weather worn nose. No, 
he hadn't been home since the Americans had 
come to war, but, of course, there was only 
one building in town big enough and new 
enough to be used by the Americans. If we 
should turn to the left and then to the right 
and then to the left again we would come to 
the school and there he thought we would find 
the Americans. We did. To the far end of 
the little town we trudged till we came to a 
low stone building, gray and white, of good 
stout masonry. We knew it was the American 
hospital because over the arched entrance there 
hung a "banniere etoilee." 

We neared the entrance to the tune of some 
trumpet blasts, not very well played, and we 
peered from arch to inner court yard just in 
time to see a swarm of khaki-half-clad soldiers 
running out from barracks. By the time they 

165 



THE A. E. F. 

reached the mess door they were khaki-clad. 
The officer who came to take us about ex- 
plained that on Sunday mornings everybody 
slept late and dressed on the way to break- 
fast and that discipline was better on week 
days. Then he told us that of all the privates 
in that unit not one had ever been a soldier 
before. They had been picked for medical 
service first and military service at such time 
as the officers had learned enough to teach it 
to them. I remember later that one of the sol- 
diers objected privately to being drilled by a 
dentist. 

Nine-tenths of the men were fresh out of 
college, the officer told us, and half the other 
tenth were freshmen or sophomores. Many of 
the enlisted men, we were told, had left in- 
comes in the tens of thousands and a few in 
the hundreds of thousands. The enlisted per- 
sonnel included one matinee idol, one young 
New York dramatic critic, two middling well 
known young authors, a composer of good but 
saleable music, and a golfer who gets two in 
the national rating. 

The wards were not very different from 
166 



HOSPITALS AND ENGINEERS 

those of a New York hospital back home, ex- 
cept that they housed a strange mixture of 
patients. About half were American soldiers 
and the rest were civilians from the country 
round about. The French civilians were con- 
vinced that though the American doctors 
might cure them with their marvelous medi- 
cines and speckless cleanliness they would 
surely kill them with air. This particular base 
hospital was fulfilling two functions for the 
civilian population. It was seeking to take 
out adenoids and let in air. A great New 
York specialist was attending to the adenoids 
and making progress. It was not always pos- 
sible to convince the patient that it would do 
him any good to have his adenoids removed, 
but if the operation gave the kind American 
doctor any pleasure he was willing to let him 
go ahead. The air campaign was making 
slower progress. Dislike of air is centuries old 
in France and it has become an instinct with 
tiie race. I rode in a railroad car with a 
French aviator on a balmy day of early 
autumn and his first act upon entering the 
compartment was to close both windows. 

167 



THE A. E. F. 

Everybody in this part of France has his bed 
placed inside a closet and at night he closes 
the doors. 

Worst of all were the extra precautions 
against air which the French peasants took in 
case of illness. The young French doctors 
were at the front and the old men who re- 
mained always began the treatment of a case 
by advising the patient's relatives to close all 
the windows and start a fire. 

At the call of sick babies and old folk of the 
countryside came aristocrats of the New York 
medical profession whose fees at home would 
have bought the house in which the patient 
lived. Later, of course, the doctors of the hos- 
pital will be more rushed by the necessities of 
the soldiers. 

"This is hardly more than a germ of what 
we plan," a doctor explained to us. "Do you 
see those tents?" He pointed across a small 
field. "Those are American engineers and 
they're going to do nothing for the next few 
months but build additions to this hospital. 
Every time I go 'way for a day I come back 
to find that they've added a thousand beds to 

168 



HOSPITALS AND ENGINEERS 

the capacity we're planning for. We will ex- 
tend all the way across the fields over to that 
road before they're done with us." He spoke 
in a joyful voice as if nothing in the world was 
quite so inspiring as a huge hospital filled with 
patients. That was the professional touch. 
I remember the story one of the doctors told 
us about a young surgeon who was sent up to 
the French front to help handle the cases after 
a big drive. One of his first patients was a 
German prisoner who had been shot just above 
the elbow and bayoneted in the stomach. The 
doctor had no great trouble with the elbow and 
he did what he could for the abdominal wound. 

"I could save that man all right if it wasn't 
for that bayonet wound," he said to another 
American doctor close at hand, and then he 
added in a reproachful voice as he pointed to 
the gash: "That's an awful dangerous place to 
stab a man." 

There were no wounded at the hospital at 
the time of our visit, but some of the soldiers 
in the medical ward were very sick. There was 
one boy there, who has since mended and gone 
away, whose recovery seemed hopeless. The 

169 



THE A. E. F. 

doctor in charge saw that something was trou- 
bling the young soldier and so he came to him 
and told him that he was aggravating his ill- 
ness by this worry or desire. 

"Whatever this thing is, you must tell me," 
said the doctor. 

"Do you think I'm going to die?" the boy 
asked anxiously. 

"Oh, I wouldn't say that," the doctor an- 
swered a little evasively. 

"I knew I was pretty sick," said the boy, 
catching the evasiveness of the doctor's tone, 
"and if you think I'm going to die and won't 
ever get back home again, there's just one 
thing I want to ask you to do for me." 

"What's that?" said the doctor. 

"Couldn't you fix it up for me just once to 
have ham and eggs and apple pie for break- 
fast?" 

The most important thing in the case of all 
the sick men was to keep them from brooding 
about home. The doctors made a point of get- 
ting around and talking to the patients to 
cheer them up. One of them complained of 
homesickness. 

170 



HOSPITALS AND ENGINEERS 

"Yes," said the doctor, "I suppose we all 
have people back there that we miss." 

"You can just bet I do," said the sick sol- 
dier, "I've got the finest wife in the world in 
Des Moines and two children and a Ford." 

The health of the staff was excellent, but 
sometimes they felt homesick, too. The en- 
listed men gave a show the night I was at the 
hospital and during the course of the perform- 
ance everybody wept or at least got moist eyed 
because the play was about New York. It 
was laid in a year as nameless as the place 
where the hospital is located. All the pro- 
gram said was: "The bachelor apartments 
of Schuyler Van Allen on a fine June night a 
few weeks after the end of the war." Schuyler 
had just come back from Europe and he found 
his apartment with everything just as it was 
on the night he had sailed for France. There 
was the daily paper he had left behind with 
the date May 3, 1917, and he looked at the old 
sheet and mused as he read some of the head- 
lines : 

"Kaiser Calls on Troops to Stand Firm," 
read Schuyler. "The Kaiser," he said to him- 

171 



THE A. E. F. 

self, and then he added: "I wonder whatever 
became of him." 

The audience laughed at that, but in a mo- 
ment the doctors and the nurses and the pa- 
tients who weren't sick enough to stay in bed 
wept. It was all because Schuyler looked out 
of the window and said to his friend: "Oh, it's 
great to be on Fifth Avenue again. I want 
to see it in every light and at every hour of 
the day. It was fairly blazing tonight with the 
same old hurrying crowd jamming the traffic 
at Forty-second Street and the same old mob 
pushing and shoving its way into the Grand 
Central subway station." The mention of the 
subway was too much for the audience. By 
this time the nurse who sat in front of me was 
dabbing violently at her eyes with her pocket 
handkerchief. She was breaking my heart and 
I leaned forward and asked: "What part of 
New York do you come from?" 

"I wasn't ever in New York," she said. "I 
come from Lima, Ohio." 

Like the medical corps, the engineers were 
peculiarly American and peculiarly efficient 
as well. We first came upon them when we 

172 



HOSPITALS AND ENGINEERS 

saw a tall, stringy man looking out of the 
window of a little locomotive which pulled a 
train up to a point at the French front. We 
thought he was an American because his jaws 
were moving back and forth slowly and medi- 
tatively. Inquiry brought confirmation. 

"Sure, I'm an American," said the man in 
the blue jumpers. "I guess I've kicked a hobo 
off the train for every telegraph pole back on 
the old Rock Island, but this is the toughest 
railroading job I've struck yet." 

The man in the locomotive was a member 
of an American regiment of railroad engineers 
which had taken over an important military 
road. They had the honor to be the first Amer- 
ican troops at the French front who came un- 
der fire. The engineers were willing to admit 
that while washouts and spreading rails were 
old stories to them, they did get a bit of a 
thrill the first time they found their tracks torn 
up by shellfire. But the aeroplanes were 
worse. 

"One night," said our friend the engineer, 
"there was one of those flying machines just 
followed along with us and every time we fired 

173 



THE A. E. F. 

the engine and the sparks flew up she'd drop a 
bomb on us or shoot at us with her machine 
gun. We tried to hit it up a bit, but she kept 
right up with us. They didn't hit us, but once 
they got so rough we just slowed down and 
laid under the engine for a spell until they 
decided to quit picking on us." 

This regiment of railroad engineers was the 
huskiest outfit I saw in France. It was care- 
fully selected from the railroads running into 
Chicago. Of the men originally selected only 
about one-seventh were taken because the rail- 
roads found so many men who were eager to 
go. One company boasted one hundred and 
twenty-five six-footers and all were two-fisted 
fighters. The discipline of the regiment, of 
course, was not that of an infantry unit. I 
watched an animated discussion between a cap- 
tain and his men as to where some material 
should be placed when the regiment first 
moved into a new camp. 

"You've got the wrong dope about that. 
Bill," said a private to his captain very earn- 
estly. The officer looked at him severely. 

"I've told you before about this discipline 
174 



HOSPITALS AND ENGINEERS 

business, Harry," he said. "Any time you 
want to kick about my orders you call me 
mister." It is hard for a railroad man to 
realize that a couple of silver bars have 
changed a yardmaster into a captain. 

The regiment set great store by the number 
thirteen. It was put into service on a Friday 
the thirteenth and it left its American base in 
two sections of thirteen cars each. The loco- 
motives' headlight numbers each totaled thir- 
teen and the thirteenth of a month found the 
regiment arriving at its European port of 
entry. The thirteenth of the next month found 
the regiment starting for its French base and 
when the camp was reached a group of inter- 
preters was waiting. 

"How many are you?" asked the colonel. 

"Myself and twelve companions," replied 
one of the Frenchmen. 

The regiment will never forget the first 
night at its French base. It arrived at mid- 
night but crowds thronged the darkened streets 
and gave the big Americans an enthusiastic 
greeting, although it was forbidden to talk 
above undertones. Since they could not hur- 

175 



THE A. E. F. 

rah for the soldiers, the villagers hugged them, 
and from black windows roses were pelted on 
shadowy figures who tramped up the street to 
the low rumble of a muffled band. 

"Great people, these French, so demonstra- 
tive," said a captain, who was once a train- 
master in a Texas town. 

"I was in the theater the other night," he 
said, "and a couple of performers on the stage 
started to sing 'Madelon.' Well, I'd heard it 
before and I knew the chorus, so when they 
got that far along I joined in. Well, there 
was a young girl sitting next me and when she 
saw that I knew the song she just threw her 
arms around my neck and kissed me. 

"And now," said the captain, "everybody in 
the regiment's after me to teach 'em that 
song." 



CHAPTER XIV 

WE VISIT THE FRENCH ARMY 

"The Germans haven't thrown a single 
shell into Rheims today," said our conducting 
officer apologetically. ''Yesterday," he con- 
tinued more cheerfully, "they sent more than 
five hundred big ones and they wounded two 
of my officers." 

We left the little inn at the fringe of the 
town and rode into the square in front of the 
cathedral. At the door the officer turned us 
over to the curator. The old man led us up 
the aisle to a point not far from the altar. 
Here he stopped, and pointing to a great shell 
hole in the floor said: "On this spot in the year 
496 Clovis, the King of the Franks, was 'bap- 
tized by the blessed St. Remi with oil which 
was brought from heaven in a holy flask by a 
dove." 

Something flew over the cathedral just 
then, but we knew it was not a dove. It whis- 

177 



THE A. E. F. 

tied like a strong wind, and presently the shop 
of a confectioner some ten blocks away folded 
up with a ripping, smashing sound. Clovis, 
with his fourteen centuries wrapped about him, 
was safe enough. He had quit the spot in 
time. But a younger man ducked. The old 
guide did not even look up. 

"The first stone of the present cathedral was 
laid in May, 1212, by the Archbishop Alberic 
de Humbert," he said. 

Another big shell tore the sky, and this time 
the smash was nearer. It seemed certainly no 
more than nine blocks away. The young man 
began to calculate. He figured that he was 
seven centuries down, while the Germans had 
nine blocks to go. That was something, but 
the guide failed to keep up his pace through 
the centuries. There were no more happy 
hiatuses. 

"Scholars dispute," he continued, "as to who 
was the architect of the cathedral. Some say 
it was designed by Robert de Coucy; others 
name Bernard de Soissons, but certain author- 
ities hold to Gauthier de Beims and Jean 
d'Orbais." Two more shells crossed the cathe- 

178 



WE VISIT THE FRENCH ARMY 

dral. The controversy seemed regrettable and 
the young man shifted constantly from foot to 
foot. He appeared to feel that there was less 
chance of being hit if he were on the wing, so 
to speak. 

"One or two have named Jean Loups," said 
the guide, but he shook his head even as he 
mentioned him. It was evident that he had 
no patience with Loups or his backers. In- 
deed, the heresy threw him off his stride, and 
the next smash which came during the lull was 
more significant than any of the others. The 
crash was the peculiarly disagreeable one 
which occurs when a large shell strikes a small 
hardware store. Even the guide noticed this 
shell. It reminded him of the war. 

"Since April," he said, "the Germans have 
been bombarding Rheims with naval guns. 
All the shells which they fire now are .320 or 
larger. They fire about 150 shells a day at 
the city, mostly in the afternoon, and they 
usually aim at the cathedral or some place near 
by." 

The young man noted by his watch that it 
was just half-past one. 

179 



THE A. E. F. 

"A week ago the Germans fired a .320 shell 
through the roof, but it did not explode. I 
will show it to you, but first I must ask you 
to touch nothing, not even a piece of glass, for 
we want to put everything back again that we 
can after the war." 

On the floor there was evidence that some 
patient hand had made a beginning of seeking 
to fit together in proper sequence all the avail- 
able tiny glass fragments from the shattered 
rose windows. It was a pitiful jigsaw puzzle, 
which would not work. The curator stepped 
briskly up the nave, and at the end of a hun- 
dred paces he stopped. 

"This is the most dangerous portion of the 
cathedral," he explained. "Most of the big 
shells have come in here." And he pointed to 
three great holes in the ceiling. Then he 
showed us the monstrous shell which had not 
exploded and the fragments of others which 
had. Down toward the west end of town fresh 
fragments were being made. Each hole in the 
cathedral roof sounded a different note as the 
shells raced overhead. But the old curator was 
musing again. He had forgotten the war, even 

180 



WE VISIT THE FRENCH ARMY 

though the smashed and twisted bits of iron 
and stone from yesterday's clean hit lay at his 
feet. 

"The first stone of the present cathedral 
was laid in May, 1212, by the Archbishop Al- 
beric de Humbert," he said. "Alberic gave all 
the money he could gather and the chapter 
presented its treasury, and all about the clergy 
appealed for funds in the name of God. 
Kings of France and mighty lords made con- 
tributions, and each year there was a great pil- 
grimage, headed by the image of the Blessed 
Virgin, through all the villages. And the 
building grew and sculptors from all parts of 
France came and embellished it and in 1430 
it was finished. You see, gentlemen," he said, 
"it took more than two hundred years to build 
our cathedral." 

We left the cathedral then and paused for a 
minute in the square before the statue of 
Jeanne d'Arc, who brought her king to 
Rheims and had him crowned. In some parts 
of France devout persons speak of the Jeanne 
statue in Rheims as a miracle because, al- 
though the cathedral has been scarred and shat- 

181 



THE A. E. F. 

tered and every building round the square 
badly damaged, the statue of Jeanne is un- 
touched. I looked closely and found the 
miracle was not perfect. A tiny bit of the 
scabbard of Jeanne had been snipped off by a 
flying shrapnel fragment, but the sword of 
Jeanne, which is raised high above her head, 
has not a nick in it. 

Crossing the square we went into the office 
of UEclaireur de VEst. This daily news- 
paper has no humorous column, no editori- 
als, no sporting page and no dramatic re- 
views, and yet is probably the most difficult 
journal in the world to edit. The chief repor- 
torial task of the staff of UEclaireur is to 
count the number of shells which fall into the 
city each day. That doesn't sound hard. The 
reporter can hear them all from his desk and 
many he can see, for the cathedra] just across 
the street is still the favorite target of the Ger- 
mans. Sometimes the reporter does not have 
to look so far. The office of L'Eclaireur has 
been hit eleven times during the bombardment 
and three members of the staff have been 
killed. One big shell fell in the composing 

182 



WE VISIT THE FRENCH ARMY 

room and so now the paper is set by hand. It 
is a single sheet and the circulation is limited 
to the three or four thousand civilians, who 
have stuck to Rheims throughout the bom- 
bardment. One of the few who remain is a 
man who keeps a picture postcard shop in a 
building next door to the newspaper office. 
His roof has been knocked down about his 
head and his business is hardly thriving. I 
asked him why he remained. 

"I started to go away several months ago 
after one day when they put some gas shells 
into the town," he said. "The very next morn- 
ing I put all my things into a cart and started 
up that street there. I had gone just about to 
the third street when a shell hit the house be- 
hind me. It killed my horse and wrecked the 
wagon and so I picked up my things and came 
back. It seemed to me I wasn't meant to go 
away from Rheims." 

The shelling increased in violence before we 
left the office of L'Eclaireur. One shell was 
certainly not more than a hundred and fifty 
yards away, but the work went on without in- 
terruption. The printers who were setting ads 

183 



THE A. E. F. 

never looked up. Mostly these advertisements 
were of houses in Rheims which were renting 
lower than ever before. If there was anyone 
in the visiting party who felt uncomfortable he 
was unwilling to show it, for just outside the 
door of the newspaper office there sat an old 
lady with a lapful of fancy work. A shell 
came from over the hills and, in the seconds 
while it whistled and then smashed, the old lady 
threaded her needle. 

A day later, when some of us were willing to 
confess that of all miserable sounds the whis- 
tling of a sheU was the meanest, we found a 
curious kink in the brain of everyone. It was 
the universal experience that the slightest bit 
of cover, however inadequate, gave a sense of 
safety out of all proportion to its utility. 
Thus we all felt much more uncomfortable in 
the square than when we stood in the compos- 
ing room of the newspaper which was shielded 
by the remains of a glass skylight. The same 
curious psychological twist can be found 
among soldiers at the front. Again and again 
men will be found taking apparent comfort in 

184 



WE VISIT THE FRENCH ARMY 

the fact that half an inch of tin roof protects 
them from the shells of the Germans. 

One is always taken from the cathedral of 
Rheims to the wine cellars. The children of 
darkness are invariably wiser than the chil- 
dren of light and the champagne merchants 
have not suffered as the churchmen have. 
Their business places have been knocked 
about their heads, but their treasures are un- 
derground deep enough to defy the biggest 
shells. In the cellar of a single company which 
we visited there were 12,000,000 quarts of 
wine. Even the German invasion at the be- 
ginning of the war failed to deplete this stock. 
Hundreds of people live in these cellars, which 
are laid out in avenues and streets. We came 
first to New York, a street with tier upon tier 
of wine bottles ; then to Boston, then to Buenos 
Ayres, then to Montreal. One of the visitors 
explained that the street named New York 
contained the wine destined to be shipped to 
that city, while Buenos Ayres contained the 
consignment for the Argentine capital, and so 
on. We nodded acceptance of the theory, but 

185 



THE A. E. F. 

[the next wine-laden street was called Camot 
and the next was Jeanne d'Arc. 

From the cellars we made a journey to a 
battery of French .75's. It was a peaceful mili- 
tary station, for so well were the guns con- 
cealed that they seemed exempt from German 
fire, in spite of the fact that they had been in 
place for half a year. The men sat about un- 
derground playing cards and reading news- 
papers, but the commander of the battery was 
unwilling that we should go with such a peace- 
ful impression of his guns. He brought his 
men to action with a word or two and sent six 
shells sailing at the German first line trenches 
for our benefit. We left, half deafened, but 
delighted. 

No child could be more eager to show a toy 
than is a French officer to let a visitor see in 
some small fashion how the war wags. We 
went from the battery to a first line trench. It 
was slow work down miles and miles of camou- 
flaged road to the communicating trench, and 
all along the line we were stopped by kindly 
Frenchmen, who wanted us to see how their 
dugouts were decorated or the nature of their 

186 



WE VISIT THE FRENCH ARMY 

dining room or the first aid dressing station or 
any little detail of the war with which they 
were directly concerned. Much can be done 
with a dugout when a few back numbers of La 
Vie Parisienne are available. Still, this scheme 
of decoration may be carried too far. I will 
never forget the face of a Y. M. C. A. man 
who joined us at a French officers' mess one 
day. It was a low ceilinged room, with pine 
walls, but not an inch of wall was visible, for 
a complete papering of La Vie Parisienne pic- 
tures had been provided. Among the ladies 
thus drafted for decorative purposes there was 
perhaps chiffon enough to make a single arm 
brassard. 

Trenches, save in the very active sectors, 
give the visitor a sense of security. Open 
places are the ones which try the nerves of 
civilians, and it was pleasant to walk with a 
wall of earth on either hand, even if some of 
us did have to stoop a bit. From the point 
where we entered the communication trench to 
the front line was probably not more than half 
a mile as the crow flies — if, indeed, he is foolish 
t;nough to travel over trenches — ^but the sunken 

187 



THE A. E. F. 

pathway turned and twisted to such an extent 
that it must have been two miles before we 
struck even the third hne. Here we were held 
while ever so many dugouts and kitchens and 
gas alarm stations and telephones were ex- 
hibited for us. They were all included in the 
routine of war, but of a sudden romance 
popped up from underground. The conduct- 
ing officer paused at the entrance of a passage. 
"Another dugout" we thought. 

"Bring them up!" said the officer to a sol- 
dier, and the poilu scrambled down the steps 
and came up with a bird cage containing two 
birds. 

"These are the last resort," explained the of- 
ficer. "We send messages from the trenches 
by telephone, if we can. If the wires are de- 
stroyed we use flashes from a light, but if that 
station is also broken and we must have help 
the birds are freed." 

Neither pigeon seemed in the least puffed 
up over the responsibility which rested upon 
him. 

The German trenches were just 400 yards 
away from the first lines of the French. It 

188 



.WE VISIT THE FRENCH ARMY 

was possible to see them by peering over the 
rim of the trench, but we quickly ducked down 
again. Presently we grew less cautious, and 
one or two tried to stare the Germans out of 
countenance. If they could see that strangers 
were peeping at them they paid no atten- 
tion. 

The French officer in charge seemed embar- 
rassed. He explained that it was an excep- 
tionally quiet day. Only the day before the 
Germans had been active with trench mortars, 
and he couldn't understand why they were 
sulking now. Possibly the bombardment from 
the French .75's, which had been going on all 
day, had softened them a bit. He looked about 
the trench deijectedly. The soldiers of the 
front line were playing cards, eating soup or 
modeling little grotesque figures out of the 
soft rock which lined the walls of the trenches. 
He called sharply to a soldier, who fetched a 
box of rifle grenades out of a cubbyhole and 
sent half a dozen, one after the other, spinning 
at the German lines. Probably they fell short, 
or perhaps the Germans were simply sullen. 
At any rate, they paid no attention. They 

189 



THE A. E. F. 

were not disposed into being prodded to show 
off for American visitors. 

The officer suddenly thought up a method 
to retrieve the lost reputation of his trench. If 
we could only stay until dark he would send us 
all out on a patroling party right up to the 
wire in front of the German first line. We de- 
clined, and made some little haste to leave this 
ever so obliging officer. In another moment 
we feared he would organize an exhibition of- 
fensive for our benefit and reserve us places in 
the first wave. 

If things were quiet on the ground there was 
plenty of activity aloft. It was a clear day, 
and both sides had big sausage balloons up for 
observation. Once a German plane tried to 
attack a French sausage, but it was driven off, 
and all day long the Germans sought without 
success to wing the balloon with one of their 
long range guns. In that particular sector on 
that particular day the French unquestionably 
had the mastery of the air. We saw four of 
their 'planes in the air to every one German, 
and once a fleet of five cruised over the Ger- 
man lines. The Boche opened on them with 

190 



WE VISIT THE FRENCH ARMY 

shrapnel. It was a clear day, without a 
breath of wind, and the white puffs clung to 
the sky at the point where they broke. Pres- 
<?ntly the French planes swooped much lower, 
and the Germans opened on them with ma- 
chine guns. Somebody has said that machine 
gun fire sounds as if a crazy carpenter was 
shingling a roof, and somebody else has com- 
pared the noise to a typewriter being operated 
in an upper room, but it is still more like a 
riveting machine. It has a business-like, me- 
thodical sound to me. To my ear there is no 
malice in a machine gun, but then I have never 
heard it from an aeroplane. 

The officer in charge accompanied us to the 
end of the communicating trench. 

"Where are you going?" he asked. 

We told him that we were going directly to 
Paris. 

"Have a good time," he said, "but leave one 
dinner and one drink for me." 

"You are going to Paris?" we asked. 

He looked over toward the German wire 
and smiled a little. "I may," he said. 



CHAPTER XV 

VERDUN 

From the hills around Verdun we saw the 
earth as it must have looked on perhaps the 
fourth day of creation week. It was all frowsy 
mud and slime. Man was down deep in the 
dust from which he will spring again some 
day. There was not even a foothold for pop- 
pies on the hills around Verdun, for mingled 
with the old earth scars were fresh ones, and 
there will be more tomorrow. 

The Germans have been pushed back of the 
edges of the bowl in which Verdun lies, and 
now their only eyes are aeroplanes. Big naval 
guns are required to reach th? city itself, but 
the Germans are not content to leave the bat- 
tered town alone. They bang away at ruins 
and kick a city which is down. They fire, too, 
at the citadel, but do no more than scratch the 
top of this great underground fortress. 

Our guide and mentor at Verdun was a dis- 
192 



VERDUN 

tingnished colonel, very learned in military 
\tactics and familiar with every phase of the 
various Verdun campaigns. The extent of his 
information was borne home to us the first day 
of the trip, for he stood the party on top of 
Fort Souville and carried on a technical talk in 
French for more than half an hour, while Ger- 
man shells, breaking a few hundred yards 
away, sought in vain to interrupt him. 

From the top of Souville it was possible to 
see gun flashes and to spy, now and again, 
aeroplanes which darted back and forth all 
day, but not a soldier of either side was to be 
seen through the strongest glasses. On no 
front have men dug in so deeply as at Verdun. 
They have good reason to snuggle into the 
earth, for the French have a story that one 
of their projectiles killed men in a dugout 
seventy-five feet below the surface. They 
thought that this terrific penetration must have 
been due to the fact that the shell hit fairly 
upon a crack in the concrete and wedged its 
way through. 

Barring plumbing, which is always an after 
thought in France, the French make the un- 

193 



THE A. E. F. 

derground dwellings of the soldiers moder- 
ately comfortable. There are ventilating 
plants and electric lights, and in the citadel 
a motion picture theater. In one under- 
ground stronghold we found the telephone 
central for all the various positions around 
Verdun. We wondered whether or not he was 
ever obliged to report, "Your party doesn't 
answer." 

We traveled far underground, and at last 
the colonel brought us out again near the high, 
bare spot where the automobiles had been left. 
As we walked down the road there was a par- 
ticularly vicious bang some place to our left. 

"That wasn't very far away," said the 
colonel. 

This was the first shell which had stirred him 
to interest or attention. Presently there came 
another bang, and this seemed just as loud. 
The colonel paused thoughtfully. 

"Maybe one of their aeroplanes has seen us 
and spotted us for the artillery," he said. "Tell 
the chauffeurs to turn the cars around at once, 
and we'll go." 

The chauffeurs turned the cars with com- 
194 



VERDUN 

mendable alacrity and the colonel walked 

slowly toward them. But his roving glance 

rested for an instant upon a little ridge across 

11 \;he valley to his left which brought memories 

II t0 his mind and he stopped in the middle of the 

j road and began: "In the Spring of 1915 " 

I On and on he went in his beautiful French 
I and described some small affair which might 
I have influenced the entire subsequent course 
of events. It seemed that if the Germans had 
varied their plan a little the French defensive 
scheme would have been upset and all sorts 
of things would have happened. At the end 
of twenty minutes he had done full justice to 
the subject and then he recollected. 

"We'd better go now," he said, "the Ger- 
mans may have spotted us." 

We messed with the French officers in the 
citadel that night and found that they were 
ready to converse on almost any subject but 
the war. Literature was their favorite topic. 
Although the colonel spoke no English, he was 
familiar with much American literature in 
translation. Poe he knew well, and he had 
read a few things of Mark Twain's. Some- 

195 



THE A. E. F. 

body mentioned William James, and a captain 
quoted at length from an essay called "A 
Moral Equivalent for War." The lieutenant 
on my right wanted to know whether Amer- 
icans still read Walt Whitman, and I won- 
dered whether the same familiarity with 
French literature would be encountered in any 
American mess. This little lieutenant had 
been a professor or instructor some place or 
other when the war began and had several 
poetical dramas in verse to his credit. He had 
written a play called "Dionysius" in rhymed 
couplets. At the beginning of the war he had 
enlisted as a private and had seen much hard 
service, which had brought him two wounds, a 
medal and a commission. He hoped ardently 
to survive the war, for he felt that he could 
write ever so much better because he had been 
thrown into close relationship with peasants 
and laborers. He found their talk meaty, and 
at times rich in poetry. One day, he remem- 
bered, his regiment had marched along a coun- 
try road in a fine spring dawn. His comrade 
to the right, a Parisian peddler, remarked as 
they passed a gleaming forest: "There is a 

196 



VERDUN 

wood where God has slept." The little lieu- 
tenant said that if he had the luck to live 
through the war he was going to write plays 
without a thought of the Greeks and their 
mythology. He hoped, if he should live, to 
write for the many as well as the few. I won- 
dered to myself just what sort of plays one of 
our American highbrows would vnrite if he 
served a campaign with the 69th or drove an 
army mule. 

The French army tries to let the men at the 
front live a little better than elsewhere if it is 
possible to get the food up to them. In the 
citadel at Verdun the men dine in style now 
that the incoming roads are pretty much im- 
mune from shell fire. Our luncheon with the 
officers on the night of the twenty-fifth of Sep- 
tember, for instance, consisted of hors 
d'oeuvres, omelette aux fines herbes, bifsteck, 
pommes parmentier, confitures, dessert, cafe, 
champagne and pinard. And for dinner we 
had potage vermicelli, oeufs bechamel, jambon 
aux epinards, chouxfleur au jus, duchesse 
chocolat, fruits, dessert, cafe and, of course, 
champagne and pinard. 

197 



THE A. E. F. 

We spent the night in the citadel and a little 
after midnight the German planes came over. 
They bombed the town and dropped a few mis- 
siles on the citadel, but they did no more than 
dent the roof a bit. Our rooms were almost 
fifty meters underground and the bombs 
sounded little louder than heavy rain on the 
roof. Certainly they did not disturb the 
Frenchman just down the hall. His snores 
were ever so much louder than the German 
bombs. 

On the morning of our second day we 
crossed the Meuse and drove down heavily 
camouflaged roads to Charny. Five hundred 
yards away a French battery was under heavy 
bombardment from big German guns. We 
could see the earth fly up from hits close to the 
gun emplacements. Five hundred yards away 
men were being killed and wounded, but the 
soldiers in Charny loafed about and smoked 
and chatted and paid no attention. This bom- 
bardment was not in their hves at all. The 
men of the battery might have been the folk 
who walk upside down on the other side of the 
earth. 

198 



VERDUN 

"The last time I came to Charny," said the 
Colonel, "I had to get in a dugout and stay 
five hours because the Germans bombarded it 
so hard. 

"But that was in the afternoon," he reas- 
sured us; "the Germans never bombard 
Charny in the morning." 

We stood and watched the two sheets of 
fire poured upon the battery until somebody 
called attention to the fact that it was almost 
noon and we returned to the citadel. And at 
two o'clock that afternoon we stood on a hill- 
top overlooking the valley and sure enough the 
Germans were giving Charny its daily strafe. 
Shells were bursting all around the peaceful 
road we had traveled in the morning. Prob- 
ably by now the men in the battery were idling 
about and taking their ease. After all there is 
something to be said for a foe who plays a 
system. 



CHAPTER XVI 

WE VISIT THE BRITISH ARMY 

He was twenty-six and a major, but he was 
three years old in the big war, and that is the 
only age which counts today in the British 
army. The little major was the first man I 
ever met who professed a genuine enthusiasm 
for war. It had found him a black sheep in 
the most remote region of a big British colony 
and had tossed him into command of himself 
and of others. Utterly useless in the pursuit 
of peace, war had proved a sufficiently com- 
pelling schoolmaster to induce the study of 
many complicated mechanical problems, of 
subtler ones of psychology, not to mention two 
languages. It is true that his German was 
limited to "Throw up your hands" and "Come 
out or we'll bomb you," but he could carry on 
a friendly and fairly extensive conversation in 
French. The tuition fee was two wounds. 

200 



WE VISIT THE BRITISH ARMY 

He was a fine, fair sample of the slashing, 
swanking British army which backs its boasts 
with battalions and makes its light words good 
with heavy guns. We rode together in a train 
for several hours on the way to the British 
front and when I told him I was a newspaper 
man he was eager to tell me something of what 
the British army had done, was doing and 
would do. 

"If they'd cut out wire and trenches and ma- 
chine guns and general staffs," said the little 
major, "we'd win in two months." Without 
these concessions he did not expect to see the 
end for at least a year. However, he was con- 
cerned for the most part with more concrete 
things than predictions, and I'd best let him 
wander on as he did that afternoon with no 
interruption save an occasional question. He 
was returning to the front after being 
wounded. There had been boating and swim- 
ming and tennis and "a deuced pretty girl" 
down there at the resort where he had been re- 
cuperating, and yet he was glad to be back. 

^*You see," the httle major explained, "I 
have been in all the shows from the beginning 

201 



THE A. E. F. 

and I'd feel pretty rotten if they were to pull 
anything off without me. The CO. wants me 
back. I have a letter here from him. He tells 
me to take all the time I need, but to get back 
as soon as I can. The CO. and I have been 
together from the beginning. It isn't that the 
new fellow isn't all right. Quite likely he's a 
better officer than I am, but the CO. wants 
the old fellows that he's seen in other shows 
and knows all about. That's why I want to 
get back. I want to see what the new fellow's 
doing with my men." 

He limped a little still, and I pressed him 
to tell me about his wound. It seemed he got 
it in "the April show." 

"There was a bit of luck about that," he 
said. "I happened to take my Webley with me 
when we went over, as well as my cane. 
They've got a silly rule now that officers 
mustn't carry canes in an attack and that they 
must wear Tommies' tunics, so the Fritzies 
can't spot them. They say we lose too many 
officers because they expose themselves. No- 
body pays much attention to that rule. You 
won't find many officers in Tommies' tunics, 

202 



WE VISIT THE BRITISH ARMY 

but you will find 'em out in front with their 
canes. 

"And there's sense to it. I've always said 
that I wouldn't ask my men to go any place I 
wasn't willing to go and to go first. 'Come 
on,' that's what we say in the British army. 
The Germans drive their men from behind. 
Some of their officers are very brave, you 
know, but that's the system. I remember in 
one show we were stuck at the third line of 
barbed wire. The guns hadn't touched it, but 
it wasn't their fault. There was a German of- 
ficer there, and he stood up on the parapet, and 
directed the machine gun fire. He'd point 
every place we were a little thick and then 
they'd let us have it. We got him, though. I 
got a machine gunner on him. Just peppered 
him. He was a mighty brave officer." 

I reminded the little major that I wanted to 
hear about his wound. 

"We were coming through a German trench 
that had been pretty well cleaned out, but close 
up against the back there was a soldier hiding. 
When I came by he cut at me with his bay- 
onet. He only got me in the fleshy part of my 

203 



THE A. E. F. 

leg, and I turned and let him have it with my 
Webley. Blew the top of his head right oiF. 
Silly ass, wasn't he? Must have known he'd 
be killed." 

I asked him if his wound hurt, and he said 
no, and that he was able to walk back, and 
felt quite chipper until the last mile. 

"The first thing a wounded man wants to 
do," he explained, "is to get away. If he's 
been hit he gets a sudden crazy fear that he's 
going to get it again. Most wounds don't hurt 
much, and as soon as a man's out of fire and 
puts a cigarette in his mouth he cheers up. 
He's at his best if it's a blighty hit." 

Here I was forced to interrupt for informa- 
tion. 

"A blighty hit! Don't you know what that 
is? It's from the song they sing now, 'Carry 
Me Back to Blighty.' Blighty's England. I 
think it's a Hindustani word that means home, 
but I won't be sure about that. Anyhow, a 
blighty hit's not bad enough to keep you in 
France, but bad enough to send you to Eng- 
land. Those are the slow injuries that aren't 
so very dangerous. 

204 



' WE VISIT THE BRITISH ARMY 

"Next to getting to Blighty a fellow wants 
a cigarette. I never saw a man hit so bad he 
couldn't smoke. I saw a British 'plane com- 
ing down one day and the tail of it was red. 
The Germans fix up their machines like that, 
but I knew this wasn't paint on a British plane. 
He made a tiptop landing, and when he got 
out we saw part of his shoulder was shot away 
and he had a hole in the top of his head. 'That 
was a close call,' he said, and he took out a 
cigarette, lighted it and took two puffs. Then 
he keeled over." 

The little major and I got out to stretch 
our legs at a station platform, and I noticed 
that salutes were punctiliously given and re- 
turned. *'I suppose," I said, quoting a bit of 
misinformation somebody had supplied, "that 
out at the front all this saluting is cut out." 

"No, sir," said the little major steriily. 
"Somebody told that to the last batch of re- 
cruits that was sent over, but we taught 'em 
better soon. They don't get the lay of it quite. 
It isn't me they salute; it's the King's uni- 
form. Of course, I don't expect a man to 
salute if I pass him in a trench; but if he's 

205 



THE A. E. F. 

smoking a cigarette I expect him to throw it 
away and I expect him to straighten up. 

"You've got to let up on some things, of 
course. There's shaving now. I expect my 
men to shave every day when they're not in 
the line, but you can't expect that in the 
trenches. Naturally, I shave myself every day 
anyhow, but I'm lenient with the men. I don't 
insist on their shaving more than every other 
day." 

When I got to the chateau where the visit- 
ing correspondents stay I found the officers at 
mess. There were four British officers, a Rou- 
manian general, a member of Parliament, a 
Dutch painter and an American newspaper- 
man. As at Verdun the conversation had 
swung around to literature. It all began be- 
cause somebody said something about Shaw 
having put up at the chateau when he visited 
the front. 

"Awful ass," said an English officer who had 
met the playwright out there. "He was no 
end of nuisance for us. Why, when he got 
out here we found he was a vegetarian, and we 

206 



WE VISIT THE BRITISH ARMY 

had to chase around and have omelettes fixed 
up for him every day." 

"I censored his stuff," said another. "I 
didn't think much of it, but I made almost no 
changes. Some of it was a little subtle, but I 
let it get by." 

"I heard him out here," said a third officer, 
"and he talked no end of rot. He said the 
Germans had made a botch of destroying 
towns. He said he could have done more dam- 
age to Arras with a hammer than the Germans 
did with their shells. Of course, he couldn't 
begin to do it with a hammer, and, anyway, he 
wouldn't be let. I suppose he never thought 
of that. Then he said that the Germans were 
doing us a great favor by their air raids. He 
said they were smashing up things that were 
ugly and unsanitary. That's silly. We could 
pull them down ourselves, you know, and, 
anyhow, in the last raid they hit the postof- 
fice." 

"The old boy's got nerve, though," inter- 
rupted another officer. "I was out at the 
front with him near Arras and there was some 
pretty lively shelling going on around us. I 

207 



THE A. E. F. 

told him to put on his tin hat, but he wouldn't 
do it. I said, 'Those German shell splinters 
may get you,' and he laughed and said if the 
Germans did anything to him*they'd be mighty 
ungrateful, after all he'd done for them. He 
don't know the Boche." 

"He told me," added a British journalist, 
" 'when I want to know about war I talk to 
soldiers.' I asked him: 'Do you mean officers 
or Tommies ?' He said that he meant Tommies. 

"Now you know how much reliance you can 
put in what a Tommy says. He'll either say 
what he thinks you want him to say or what 
he thinks you don't want him to say. I told 
Shaw that, but he paid no attention." 

Here the first officer chimed in again. 
"Well, I stick to what I've said right along. 
I don't see where Shaw's funny. I think he's 
silly." 

The major who sat at the head of the table 
deftly turned the conversation away from lit- 
erary controversy. "What did you think of 
Conan Doyle?" he said. 

Bright and early next morning we started 
208 



WE VISIT THE BRITISH ARMY 

out to follow in the footsteps of Shaw. We 
went through country which had been shocked 
and shaken by both sides in their battles and 
then dynamited in addition by the retreating 
Germans. I stood in Peronne which the Ger- 
mans had dynamited with the greatest care. 
They left the town for dead, but against a shat- 
tered wall was a sign which read, "Regimental 
cinema tonight at the Splinters — CHARLIE 
CHAPLIN IN SHANGHAIED." This 
was first aid. A frozen man is rubbed with 
snow and a town which has suffered German 
frightfulness is regaled with Charlie Chaplin. 
Life will come back to that town in time and 
to others. After all life is a rubber band and 
it will be just as it was only an instant after 
they let go. We turned down the road to 
Arras and drove between fields which had 
been burned to cinders and trodden into mud 
by men and guns only a few weeks ago. Now 
the poppies were sweeping all before them. 
Into the trenches they went and over. First 
line, second line, third line, each fell in turn 
to the redcoats. They were so thick that the 
earth seemed to bleed for its wounds. 

209 



THE A. E. F. 

Presently we were in Arras and our oflSeer 
led us into the cathedral. "We won't stay in 
here long," said the officer. "The Germans 
drop a shell in here every now and then and 
the next one may bring the rest of the walls 
down. People keep away from here." This 
indeed seemed a very citadel of destruction 
and loneliness, but as we turned to go we 
heard a mournful noise from an inner room. 
We investigated and found a Tommy prac- 
ticing on the cornet. He was playing a piece 
entitled, "Progressive Exercises for the Cor- 
net — Number One." He stood up and 
saluted. 

"Have the Germans bombarded the town at 
all today?" the captain asked. 

"Yes, sir," said the Tommy. "They bom- 
barded the square out in front here this morn- 
ing." 

"Did they get anybody?" 

"No, sir, only a Frenchman, sir," replied the 
Tommy with stiff formality. 

"Was there any other activity?" 

"Yes, sir, there were some aeroplanes over 
about an hour ago and they dropped some 

210 



WE VISIT THE BRITISH ARMY 

bombs in there," said the Tommy indicating a 
street just back of the cathedral. 

"And what were we doing?" persisted the 
captain. 

"We were trying out some new anti-aircraft 
ammunition," explained the Tommy patiently, 
"but I don't think it was any good, sir, because 
most of it came down and buried itself over 
there," and he indicated a spot some fifteen or 
twenty feet from his music room. 

The captain could think of no more in- 
quiries just then and the soldier quickly folded 
up his cornet and his music and after saluting 
with decent haste left the cathedral. For the 
sake of his music he was willing to endure 
shells and bombs and shrapnel fragments but 
questions put him off his stride entirely. He 
fled, perhaps, to some shell hole for solitude. 

From the cathedral we went to the town 
hall. Here again one could not but be im- 
pressed with the futility of destruction. The 
Germans have torn the building cruelly with 
their shells and their dynamite, but beauty is 
tough. Dynamite a bakeshop and you have 
only a mess. Shell a tailor's and rubbish is 

211 



THE A. E. F. 

left. But it is different when you begin to 
turn your guns against cathedrals and town 
halls. If a structure is built beautifully it will 
break beautifully. The dynamite has cut fine 
lines in the jagged ruins of the Town Hall. 
The Germans have smashed everything but 
the soul of the building. They didn't get that. 
It was not for want of trying, but dynamite 
has its limitations. 

We got up to the lines the next day and had 
a fine view of the opposing trench systems for 
ten or twelve miles. Our box seat was on top 
of a hill just back of Messines ridge. We saw 
a duel between two aeroplanes, the explosion 
of a munitions dump, and no end of big gun 
firing but the officer who conducted us said 
that it was a dull morning. Our day on the 
hill was a clear one after three days of low 
clouds, and all the fliers were out in force. Al- 
most two dozen British 'planes were to be seen 
from the hilltop, as well as several captive bal- 
loons. Although the English 'planes flew well 
over the German lines, they drew no fire, but 
presently the sky began to gro^ woolly. Lit- 
tle round white patches appeared, one against 

212 



WE VISIT THE BRITISH ARMY 

the other, cutting the sky into great flannel 
figures. Then we saw above it all a 'plane so 
high as to be hardly visible. Indeed, we should 
not have seen it but for the telltale shrapnel. 
These were our guns, and this was no friend. 
Now it was almost over our heads. It seemed 
intent upon attacking one of the British cap- 
tive balloons, which could only stand and wait. 
The guns were snarling now. We were close 
enough to hear the anger in every shot. The 
shrapnel broke behind, below, above and in 
front of the aeroplane, but on it sailed, un- 
touched, like a glass ball in a Buffalo Bill 
shooting trick. 

Yet here was no poor marksmanship, for at 
ten thousand feet the air pilot has forty sec- 
onds to dodge each shell. He merely has to 
watch the flash of the gun and then dive or rise 
or slide to right or left. Sometimes, indeed, 
the shrapnel lays a finger on him, but he whirls 
away out of its grip like a quarterback in a 
broken field. The guns stopped firing, al- 
though the German was still above the British 
lines. Somebody was up to tackle him at 
closer range. Where our 'plane came from 

213 



THE A. E. F. 

we did not know. The sky was filled all 
morning with English fliers, but each appeared 
to have definite work in hand, and not one paid 
the slightest attention to the German intruder. 
This was a special assignment. When we 
caught sight of the English flier he had 
maneuvered into a position behind his Ger- 
man adversary. We caught the flashes from 
the machine guns, but we could hear no sound 
of the fight above us. The 'planes darted for- 
ward and back. They were clever little ban- 
tams, these, and neither was able to put in a 
finishing blow. Our stolid guiding officer was 
up on his toes now and rooting as if it were 
some sporting event in progress. Looking 
upward at his comrade, ten thousand feet aloft, 
he cried: "Let him have it!" 

The hostile attitude of the spectators or 
something else discouraged the German and 
he turned and made for his own lines. The 
Englishman pursued him for a time and then 
gave up the chase. The consensus of opinion 
was that the Briton had won the decision on 
points. 

"They've been making a dead set for our 
214 



WE VISIT THE BRITISH ARMY 

balloons all week," said an English soldier 
after the German 'plane had been driven away. 

"If they get the balloon does that mean that 
they get the observer?" I asked in my igno- 
rance. 

"Lord bless you no," said the soldier. "No 
danger for 'im, sir. He just jumps out with 
a parachute." 

Next we turned our attention to the big gun 
firing. We could see the flash of the guns of 
both sides and hear the whistle of the shells. 
After the flash one might mark the result if 
he had a sharp eye. There was no trouble in 
following the progress of one particular Brit- 
ish shell for an instant after the flash a high 
column of smoke arose above a town which the 
Germans held. A minute or so later we had 
our own column for a German shell hit one 
of the many munition dumps scattered about 
behind the British front. Our own hill was 
pocked with shell holes and the tower near 
which we stood was nibbled nigh to bits and 
we had a wakeful, stimulating feeling that al- 
most any minute something might drop on or 

215 



THE A. E. F. 

near us. The Tommy with whom we shared 
the view undeceived us. 

*This hill!" he said. "Why there was a 
time when it was as much as your life was 
worth to stand up here and now the place's 
nothing but a bloomin' Cook's tour resort." 

Our last day with the army was spent at the 
University of Death and Destruction where 
the men from England take their final courses 
in warfare. We began with a class which was 
having a lesson in defense against bombs. A 
tin can exploded at the feet of a Scotchman and 
peppered his bare legs. Five hundred sol- 
diers roared with laughter, for the man in the 
kilt had flunked his recitation in "Trench Raid- 
ing." Officially the Scot was dead, for the tin 
can represented a German bomb. They were 
cramming for war in the big training camp 
and they played roughly. The imitation 
bombs carried a charge of powder generous 
enough to insure wholesome respect. The 
Scot, indeed, had to retire to have a dressing 
made. 

The trench in which the class was hard at 
work was perfect in almost every detail, save 

216 



WE VISIT THE BRITISH ARMY 

that it lacked a back wall. This was removed 
for the sake of the audience. An instructor 
stood outside and every now and again he 
would toss a bomb at his pupils. He played 
no favorites. The good and the bad scholar 
each had his chance. In order to pass the 
course the soldier had to show that he knew 
what to do to meet the bomb attack. He 
might take shelter in the traverse; he might 
kick the bomb far away; or, with a master's 
degree in view, he might pick up the imitation 
bomb and hurl it far away before it could ex- 
plode. Speed and steady nerves were re- 
quired for this trick. An explosion might eas- 
ily blow off a finger or two. Yet, after all, it 
was practice. Later there might be other 
bombs designed for bigger game than fingers. 
We followed the students from bombs to 
bayonets. The men with the cold steel were 
charging into dummies marked with circles to 
represent spots where hits were likely to be 
vital. It looked for all the world like football 
practice and the men went after the dummies 
as the tacklers used to do at Soldiers' Field of 
an afternoon when the coach had pinned blue 

217 



THE A. E. F. 

sweaters and white "Y's" on the straw men. 
There was the same severely serious spirit. In 
a larger field a big class was having instruc- 
tion in attack. Before them were three lines 
of trenches protected by barbed wire ankle 
high. At a signal they left their trench and 
darted forward to the next one. Here they 
paused for a moment and then set sail for the 
second trench. At another signal they were 
out of that and into a third trench. From 
here they blazed away at some targets on the 
hill representing Germans and consolidated 
their positions. Instructors followed the 
charge along the road which bordered the in- 
struction field. They mingled praise and 
blame, but ever they shouted for speed. "Make 
this go now," would be the cry, and to a luck- 
less wight who had been upset by barbed wire 
and sent sprawling: "What do you mean by 
lying there, anyhow?" 

It was a New Zealand company which I 
saw, and in the class were a number of Maoris. 
These were fine, husky men of the type seen in 
the Hawaiian Islands. All played the game 
hard, but none seemed so imaginatively stirred 

218 



WE VISIT THE BRITISH ARMY 

by it as the Maoris. They were fairly carried 
away by the enthusiasm of a charge, and left 
their trenches each time shouting at top voice. 
The capture of the third trench by no means 
satisfied them. They wanted to go on and on. 
If the officer had not called a halt there's no 
telling but that they might have invaded the 
next field and bayoneted the bombardiers. 
Over the hill there was a rattle of machine 
guns and beyond that a more scattering vol- 
ume of musketry. We stopped and watched 
the men at their rifle practice. 

"You wouldn't believe it," said the in- 
structor, "but we've got to keep hammering it 
home to men that rifles are meant to shoot 
with. For a time you heard nothing but bay- 
onets. A gun might have been nothing more 
than a pike. Later everything was bombs, 
and sometimes soldiers just stood and waited 
till the Boches got close, so that they could peg 
something at 'em. But when these men go 
away they're going to know that the bombs 
and the bayonet are the frill. It's the shoot- 
ing that counts." 

We saw a good deal of the British army dur- 
219 



THE A. E. F. 

ing our trip but the thing which gave me the 
clearest insight into the fundamental fighting, 
sporting spirit of the army was a story which 
an officer told me of an incident which oc- 
curred in the sector where he was stationed. 
An enlisted man and an officer were trapped 
during a daylight patrol when a mist lifted and 
they had to take shelter in a shell hole. They 
lay there for some hours, and then the soldier 
endeavored to make a break back for his own 
trenches. No sooner had his head and shoul- 
ders appeared above the shell hole than a Ger- 
man machine gun pattered away at him. He 
was hit and the officer started to climb up to 
his assistance. 

"No, don't come," said the soldier. "They 
got me, sir." He put his hand up and indi- 
cated a wound on the left hand side of his chest. 
"It was a damn good shot," he said. 



CHAPTER XVII 

BACK FROM PRISON 

Feance has a better right to fight than any 
nation in the world because she can wage war, 
even a slow and bitter war, with a gesture. 
Misery does not blind the French to the dra- 
matic. Even the tears and the heartache are 
made to count for France. We saw wounded 
men come back from German prison camps 
and Lyons made the coming of these wrecked 
and shattered soldiers a pageant. Gray men, 
grim men, silent men stood up and shouted like 
boys in the bleachers because there was some- 
one there to greet them with the right word. 
There is always somebody in France who has 
that word. 

This time it was a lieutenant colonel of ar- 
tillery. He was a man big as Jess Willard 
and his voice boomed through the station like 
one of his own huge howitzers as he swung his 

221 



THE A. E. F. 

arm above his head and said to the men from 
Germany: "I want you all to join with me in 
a great cry. Open your throats as well as your 
hearts. The cry we want to hear from you is 
one that you want to give because for so long 
a time you have been forbidden to cry *Vive 
la France.' " The big man shouted as he said 
it, but this time the howitzer voice was not 
lieard above the roar of other voices. 

The French soldiers who came back from 
Germany had been for some little time in a 
recuperation camp in Switzerland. A few 
were lame, many were thin and peaked and al- 
most all were gray, but the Lyonnaise said 
that this was not nearly so bad as the last train 
load of men from German prisons. There 
were no madmen this time. 

The windows of the cars were crowded with 
faces as the train came slowly into the sta- 
tion. There was no shouting until the big man 
made his speech. Some of the returned pris- 
oners waved their hands, but most of them 
greeted the soldiers and the crowds which 
waited for them with formal salutes. A file 
of soldiers was drawn up along the platform 

222 



BACK FROM PRISON 

and outside the station was a squad of cavalry 
trying to stand just as motionless as the in- 
fantry. There were horns and trumpets in- 
side the station and out and they blew a nip- 
ping, rollicking tune as the train rolled in. 
The wounded men, all but a few on stretchers, 
descended from the cars in military order. 
Lame men with canes hopped and skipped in 
order to keep step with their more nimble com- 
rades. 

There was an old woman in black who darted 
out from the crowd and wanted to throw her 
arms around the neck of a young soldier, but 
he waved to her not to come. You see she 
still thought of him as a boy, but that had been 
three years ago. He was a marching man now 
and it would never do to break the formation. 
Group by group they came from the train with 
a new blare of the trumpets for each unit. 
There were 416 French soldiers, thirty-seven 
French officers and seventeen Belgians. They 
marched past the receiving group of officers 
and saluted punctiliously, though it was a lit- 
tle bit hard because their arms were full of 
flowers. When they had all been gathered in 

223 



THE A. E. F. 

the waiting room of the station the big colonel 
made his speech. He did not speak very long 
because the returned soldiers could see out of 
the corner of their eyes that just across the 
room were big tables with scores of expectant 
and anticipatory bottles of champagne. But 
there was fizz, too, to the talk of the big colonel. 
I had the speech translated for me afterwards 
but I guessed that some of it was about the 
Germans, for I caught the phrase "inhuman 
cruelty." 

"You have a right to feel now that you are 
back on the soil of France after all these years 
of inhuman cruelty that your work is done," 
said the colonel, "but there is still something 
that you must do. There is something that you 
ought to do. You will tell everybody of the 
wrongs the Germans have inflicted upon you. 
You will tell exactly what they have done and 
you will thus serve France by increasing the 
hatred between our people and their people." 

The soldiers and the crowd cheered then al- 
most as loudly as they did later in the great 
shout of "Vive la France." The gray men, the 
grim men and the silent men were stirred by 

224 



BACK FROM PRISON 

what the colonel said because they did and will 
forever have a quarrel with the German peo- 
ple. 

"We are doubly glad to welcome you back 
to France because our hearts have been so 
cheered by the coming of America," continued 
the colonel. "Victory seems nearer and nearer 
and vengeance for all the things you have en- 
dured." It was then that he snatched the great 
shout of "Vive la France" from the crowd. 

As the din died down the corks began to 
pop and men who a little time before had 
not even been sure of a proper ration of water 
began to gulp champagne out of tin cups. The 
sting of the wine, the excitement and the din 
were too much for one returned prisoner. He 
had scarcely lifted his glass to his lips than he 
fell over in a heap and there was one more 
weary wanderer to make his return sickabed 
in a stretcher. But the rest marched better 
as they came out of the station with band tunes 
blaring in their ears and God knows what tunes 
singing in their hearts as they clanked along 
the cobbles. For they had been dead men and 
they were back in France and there was sun 

225 



THE A. E. F. 

in the sky. When they crossed the bridge they 
broke ranks. The old woman in black was 
there and for just a minute the marching man 
became a boy again. 



CHAPTER XVIII 

FINISHING TOUCHES 

The American army had begun to find it- 
self when October came round. Perhaps it 
had not yet gained a complete army conscious- 
ness, but there could be no doubt about com- 
pany spirit. Chaps who had been civilians only 
a few months before now spoke of "my com- 
pany" as if they had grown up with the out- 
fit. They were also ready to declare loudly 
and profanely in public places that H or L or 
K or I, as the case might be, was the best com- 
pany in the army. Some were willing to let 
the remark stand for the world. 

Too much credit cannot be given to the cap- 
tains of the first American Expeditionary 
Force. A captain commands more men now 
than ever before in the American army and he 
has more power. This was particularly true in 
France where many companies had a little vil- 

227 



THE A. E. F. 

lage to themselves. The captain, therefore, 
was not only a military leader, a father con- 
fessor, and a gents' furnisher, but also an am- 
bassador to the people of a small section of 
France. The colonels. and majors and the rest 
are the fellows who think up things to be done, 
but it is the captains who do them. 

Of course that wasn't the way the junior 
officers looked at it. A man who was a first 
lieutenant when the army came to France told 
us: "A first lieutenant is supposed to know 
everything* and do everything; a captain is sup- 
posed to know everything and do nothing, and 
a major is supposed to know nothing and do 
nothing." 

We were delighted early this year when we 
heard that he had been made a major, for we 
immediately sat down and telegraphed to him : 
"After what you told us this summer, we are 
sure you will be an excellent major." 

By October much of the feeling between the 
officers of the regular army and the reserve had 
been smoothed out, but it was not like that in 
the early days. Once when a young reserve 
major was put in command of a battalion, a 

228 



FINISHING TOUCHES 

regular army captain who was much his senior 
in years observed: "I think there ought to be 
an army regulation that no reserve officer shall 
be appointed to command a battalion without 
the consent of his parents or guardian." But 
as the work grew harder and harder many little 
jealousies of the army were simply sweated 
out. It was easy to do that, for the American 
army woke up, or rather was awakened, every 
morning at five o'clock. There was a Kansas 
farmer in one company who was always up and 
waiting for the buglers. He said that the 
schedule of the American army always left him 
at a loss as to what to do with his mornings. 
But for the rest the trumpeters were compelled 
to blow their loudest. Roll call was at five- 
thirty and this was followed with setting up 
exercises designed to give the men an appetite 
for the six o'clock breakfast. This was almost 
always a hearty meal. The poilus who began 
the day with a cup of black coiFee and a little 
war bread were amazed to see the doughboys 
start off at daylight with Irish stew, or bacon 
or ham or mush and occasionally eggs in addi- 
tion to- white bread and coffee. 

229 



THE A. E. F. 

After breakfast came sick call, at which men 
who felt unable to drill for any reason were 
obliged to talk it over with the doctor. Those 
who had no ailments went to work vigorously 
in making up their cots and cleaning their 
quarters. At seven they fell in and marched 
away to the training ground. Mornings were 
usually devoted to bombing, machine gun and 
automatic rifle practice. A little after eleven 
the doughboys started back to their billets for 
dinner. This was likely to consist of beans 
and boiled beef or salmon, or there would be 
a stew again or corned beef hash. The most 
prevalent vegetables were potatoes and canned 
corn. Dinner might also include a pudding, 
nearly always rice or canned fruit. Sometimes 
there was jam and, of course, coffee and bread 
were abundant. 

During the latter part of the training period 
the home dinner was often omitted in favor of 
a meal prepared at the training ground. The 
afternoon work began a little before two. Rifle 
practice, drills and bayonet work were usually 
the phases of warfare undertaken at this time 
of day. Labor ceased at four with supper, 

230 



FINISHING TOUCHES 

which was much the same sort of meal as din- 
ner, at five-thirty. After supper the soldier's 
time was pretty much his own. He could loaf 
about the town hall and listen to the army band 
play selections from "The Fair Co-ed," "The 
Prince of Pilsen" or any one of a score of comic 
operas long dead and forgotten by everyone 
but army bandmasters, or he could go to the 
Y. M. C. A. and read or write letters or play 
checkers or perhaps pool of the sort which is 
possible on a small portable table. He was 
due back in quarters and in bed at nine and 
he was always asleep at one minute and thirty 
seconds after nine. 

The training hours became more crowded, if 
not longer, as the time drew nearer when the 
American army should go to the front. Every- 
body was anxious that they should make a good 
showing. Trench problems had to be consid- 
ered and gas and bayonet work which was the 
phase in which the training was lagging some- 
what. It was also considered useful that the 
men should have some experience with shell 
fire before they heard guns fired in anger, and 
so it was arranged that a sham battle should 

231 



THE A. E. F. 

take place in which the French would fire a 
barrage over the heads of the American troops. 
The first plan was that the doughboys should 
advance behind this barrage as in actual war- 
fare and attack a system of practice trenches. 
Later it was decided that it was not worth 
while to risk possible casualties, as the men 
could learn almost as much although held four 
or five hundred yards behind the barrage. 

The bombardment began with thirty-six 
shots to the minute and was gradually raised 
to fifty-two. The doughboys were allowed to 
sit down to watch the show. Our soldiers 
seemed a bit unfeeling, for not one expressed 
any regret at the destruction of Hindenburg, 
Ludendorff, and Mackensen, although they 
had spent many a happy afternoon under the 
broiling sun constructing this elaborate trench 
system. None of the men seemed disturbed, 
either, by the unfamiliar whistling sounds over 
head. All the doughboys wore steel helmets 
but two were slightly injured by small frag- 
ments from shells which fell a little short. In 
both cases the wounded man had lowered the 
protective value of his helmet somewhat by 

232 



FINISHING TOUCHES 

sitting on it. After the first interest in the 
show wore off many proved their ability to 
steal naps in spite of the bickering of the big 
guns. The marines, for instance, had marched 
eighteen miles after rising at 3 :30 in the morn- 
ing, and although the marine corps is singu- 
larly hardy, a few made up lost sleep. The 
patter of the French seventy-fives was no more 
than rain on the roof to these men when they 
could find sufficient cover to sleep unobserved. 

The most fortunate soldiers were those who 
were stationed in a fringe of woods which bor- 
dered on the big meadow. Here the dough- 
boys did a little shooting on their own ac- 
count when no officers were at hand. In a 
sudden lull of gunfire I heard a voice say: 
"Shoot it all," and there was a rattle of dice 
in the bottom of a steel helmet. 

When the bombardment was at its height a 
big hawk sailed over the field full in the path- 
way of hundreds of shells. He circled about 
calmly in spite of the shrieking things which 
whizzed by him and then he turned contempt- 
uously and flew away very slowly. Perhaps 

233 



THE A. E. F. 

he was disappointed because it was only a 
sham battle. 

Of course some of the officers saw the real 
thing. Many made trips to the French front 
and a few fired some shots at the German lines 
just to set a good precedent. American of- 
ficers attended all the French offensives of 
the summer as invited guests. Brigadier Gen- 
eral George Duncan and Lieutenant Colonel 
Campbell King were cited by the French armj^ 
for the croix de guerre after they had spent 
some thrilling hours at Verdun. The awards 
were largely complimentary, of course, but the 
American officers saw plenty of action. Ac- 
cording to the French officers General Duncan 
was at an advanced observation post when the 
Germans spotted it and began pouring in shell. 
One fragment hit the General's hat and the 
colonel in charge advised him that it would be 
well to move back to a safer point of vantage. 
Duncan replied that this was the first show he 
had ever seen and that he did not want to give 
up his front row seat if he could help it. 

Lieutenant Colonel King paid visits to the 
first aid dressing stations under heavy fire and 

234 



FINISHING TOUCHES 

encouraged the wounded with words of good 
cheer in bad French. The night before the 
attack his dugout was flooded with poison 
vapor from German gas shells, but he awoke in 
time to arouse his two companions, who got 
their masks on in time to prevent injury. An- 
other American officer who shall be nameless 
found it difficult to sit back as a spectator when 
so much was going on. He was a brigadier 
general, but this was his first taste of war on 
a big scale. The French offensive aroused his 
enthusiasm so much that he said to a fellow 
American officer : "Nobody's watching us now, 
let's sneak up ahead there and throw a few 
bombs." The second officer, who was only a 
captain, reminded him of his rank. 

"I can't help that," said the General, '*I've 
just got to try and see if I can't bomb a few 
squareheads." Discipline was overlooked for 
a moment then as the captain restrained the 
General with physical force from going for- 
ward to try out his arm. 

The British now seem to be able to give the 
Germans more than they want in gas, but this 
superiority did not come until late in the year. 

235 



THE A. E. F. 

American officers who went to the front re- 
turned with a profound respect for German 
gas and, in fact, all gas. This feeling was re- 
flected in the thoroughgoing training which the 
men received in gas and masks. It began with 
lectures by the company commanders in which 
it is certain no very optimistic picture of poison 
vapor was painted. Then came long drills in 
putting on the mask in three counts and hold- 
ing the breath during the adjustment. The 
contrivance used was not a little like a catcher's 
mask and this simplified the problem somewhat. 
The men carried the masks with them every- 
where and developed great speed in get- 
ting under protection. Conscientious officers 
harassed their men by calling out "gas attack" 
at unexpected moments such as when men were 
shaving or eating or sleeping. Finally the 
doughboys were actually sent through gas. 

Big air-proof cellars were constructed in 
each village and here the tests were held. As 
a matter of fact, the gas used w^as a form of 
tear gas, calculated to irritate the eyes and nose 
and perhaps to cause blindness for a few hours. 
It would not cause permanent injury even if 

236 



FINISHING TOUCHES 

a mask were improperly adjusted. The com- 
parative harmlessness of the test vapor was 
kept secret. When the men went down the 
steps they thought that one whiff of the air in 
the cellar would be fatal and so they were most 
careful that each strap should be in its place. 
Most of them had shaved twice over on the 
morning of the test so that the mask should fit 
closely to the side of the face. 

The first man to go in was a captain and 
when he came out again obviously alive and 
seemingly healthy, the doughboys were ready 
to take a chance. A young soldier in the sec- 
ond batch to visit the gas chamber had taken 
the tales of the vapor horrors a bit too much 
to heart. He became panicstricken after one 
minute in the underground vault and had to be 
helped out, faint and trembling. 

"What's the matter?" said his officer, "Are 
you afraid?" 

"Yes, sir," the boy answered frankly. "But 
I want to try it again," he added quickly. He 
did, too. And what is more, he remained in for 
an extra period as self-discipline for his soul. 
When he came out he leaned against a fence 

237 



THE A. E. F. 

and was sick, but he was triumphant because 
he had proved to himself that his second wind 
of grit was stronger than his nerves or his 
stomach. 

As the afternoon wore on a trip through the 
gas chamber became a lark rather than an ad- 
venture and each batch before it went in was 
greeted by such remarks as "Never mind the 
good-byes, Snooty! Just pay me that $2 you 
owe me before you check off." 

"Who invented this gas stuff, anyway?" 
asked a fat soldier, as he sat in the stifling 
vault, puffing and perspiring. "The Ger- 
mans," he was told. 

"Well," he panted, "I'm going to give 'em 
hell for this." 

There was other practice which seemed less 
warlike. Particular attention was paid to sig- 
naling and men on hilltops stood and waved 
their arms at each other from dawn until sun- 
set. I stood one bright day with an expert who 
was trying the utmost capacity of the man sta- 
tioned on the hill across the valley. The of- 
ficer made the little flags whirl through the air 
like bunting on a battleship. He looked across 

238 



FINISHING TOUCHES 

the peaceful countryside and saw war dangers 
on every hand. The gas attack which his flags 
predicted seemed nothing more to me than the 
dust raised by a passing army truck. He sig- 
naled that the tanks were coming, but they 
mooed as they moved and the aeroplanes of 
which he spoke in dots and dashes cawed most 
distinctly. With a twist of his wrist he would 
summon a battery and with another send them 
back again. There was an emphatic whip and 
swirl of color, and in answer to the signal 
mythical infantry swarmed over theoretical 
trenches to attack shadow soldiers. The task 
of the receiving soldier was made more difficult 
because every now and then the officer would 
vary his military messages with "Double- 
header at the Polo Grounds today" or "Please 
pass the biscuits." But the soldier read them 
all correctly. Biscuits were just as easy for 
him as bullets. 

The men were also tested for their ability 
to carry oral messages. As a result of this 
drill there were several new mule drivers. The 
test message was, "Major Blank sends his com- 
pliments to Captain Nameless and orders him 

239 



THE A. E. F. 

to move L company one-half mile to the east 
and support K company in the attack." After 
giving out this message the officer moved to the 
top of a hill to receive it. The first soldier who 
came up had difficulty in delivering the mes- 
sage because English seemed more alien to him 
than Italian. He had it all right at that, ex- 
cept that he made it a mile and a half. The 
next three delivered the message correctly, but 
then a large soldier came panting up, fairly 
bursting with excitement, and exclaimed: "The 
major says he hopes you're feeling all right 
and please take your company a mile to the 
east and attack K company." The names of 
such careless messengers were noted down so 
that they might not cause blunders in battle. 

Precaution was taken against another source 
of mistakes by sending American officers out to 
drill French units. A few found no trouble 
in giving orders which the poilus could under- 
stand, but some had bad cases of stage fright. 

"I almost wiped out a French battalion," 
said one young West Pointer. "I got 'em 
started all right with *avance' and they went 
off at a great clip. I noticed that there was a 

240 



FINISHING TOUCHES 

cliff right ahead of us and I began to try and 
think how you said 'halt' in French. I couldn't 
remember and I didn't want to get out in front 
and flag 'em by waving my arms, so we just 
kept marching right on toward the cliff. They 
had their orders and they kept on going. It 
began to look as if we'd all march right off the 
cliff just to satisfy their pride and mine, but a 
French lieutenant came to the rescue with *a 
gauche en quatre!' I didn't know that one, 
but I was a goat just the same. I could have 
gotten av/ay with 'halt' all right, because I 
found out afterwards that it's 'halte' in French 
and that sounds almost the same." 

The British as well as the French helped in 
the final polishing of the doughboys who were 
to go to the trenches. An English major and 
three sergeants came to camp to teach bayonet 
work. They brought a healthy touch of blunt 
criticism. The major told some young officers 
who were studying in a training school that he 
wanted a trench dug. He told them the length 
and the depth which he wanted and the time 
at which he expected it to be finished. It was 
not done at the appointed hour. "Oh, I say, 

241 



THE A. E. F. 

that's rotten, you know!" exclaimed the big 
Englishman. The American officer in charge 
was somewhat startled. The French were al- 
ways careful to phrase unfavorable criticism 
in pleasant words and there were times when 
the sting was not felt. A rebuke so directly 
expressed surprised the American so much that 
he started to make excuses for his men. He 
explained that the soil in which they were dig- 
ging was full of rocks. The British major cut 
him short. 

"Never mind about the excuses," he said, 
"that was rotten work and you know it." 

Curiously enough the American army got 
along very well with this particular instructor 
and he on his part had the highest praise for 
the capabilities of the American after he had 
sized them up in training. He was more suc- 
cessful than the French in wheedling the 
Americans into visualizing actual war condi- 
tions in their practice. 

"Never let your men remember that they are 
charging dummies," said the visiting major to 
an American officer. "Make them think the 

242 



FINISHING TOUCHES 

straw men are Germans. It can be done even 
without the use of dummies. Watch me." 

A remarkable demonstration followed. The 
major sent for a little Cockney sergeant. 
"Now," he said, "this stick of mine with a knob 
on the end is a German. Show these Amer- 
icans how you would go after him." 

The little sergeant did some brisk work in 
slashing at the end of the stick with his bayonet 
but the big major was not content. "Remem- 
ber," he said, "this is a German," and then he 
would add suddenly every now and again: 
"Look out, my lad — ^he's coming at you!" 

And bye-and-bye the insinuation began to 
take effect. The little man had spent two 
years on the line and it was easy to see that 
bit by bit he was beginning to visualize the 
stick with a cloth knob as a Boche adversary. 
His thrusts grew fiercer and fiercer. The point 
of his bayonet flashed into the cloth knob again 
and again. He was trembling with rage as he 
played the battle game. As he finally flung 
himself upon the stick and knocked it out of 
the major's hands the officer called a halt. 

"There," he said to the Americans, "if your 
243 



THE A. E. F. 

men are to train well, you've got to make them 
believe it's true, and you can do it." 

The British added lots of snap to the Amer- 
ican training because they knew how to arouse 
the competitive spirit. They made even the 
most routine sort of a drill a game, and whether 
the men were bayoneting dummies or shooting 
at tin cans the little Britishers kept them at 
top speed by stirring up rivalry between the 
various organizations. Sometimes the slang 
was a bit puzzling. The marines, for instance, 
didn't know just what their bayonet instructor 
meant when he said: "Come on, you dread- 
noughts, give 'em the old 'kamerad.' " 

Curiously enough the other specialty in ad- 
dition to bayonet work which the British taught 
the doughboys was organized recreation. Thus 
a British sergeant would take his squad from 
practicing the grimmest feature of all war 
training and set the men to tossing beanbags or 
playing leapfrog. Prisoner's base, red rover 
and a score of games played in the streets of 
every American city were used to bring relaxa- 
tion to the soldiers. There were other rough 
and tumble games in which the players buf- 

244 



FINISHING TOUCHES 

feted each other assiduously in a neutral part 
of the body with knotted towels. The em- 
phasis was put upon the ludicrous in all these 
games. 

"This may seem childish and silly to you/' 
said the major, "but we have found on the line 
that the quickest way to bring back the spirit 
of a regiment which has been battered in bat- 
tle is to take the men as soon as they come from 
the trenches and set them to playing these fool- 
ish little games which they knew when they 
were lads. When we get them to laughing 
again we know we've made them forget the 
fight." 

Mostly it wasn't play. There were long 
mornings and afternoons spent in battalion 
problems in which the doughboys again and 
again captured the position made up of the 
trenches Roosevelt, Taft and Wilson. One 
general pointed out that communication be- 
tween Roosevelt and Taft would be necessarily 
difficult and between Roosevelt and Wilson all 
but impossible. The doughboys overcame 
these difficulties as they advanced under theo- 

245 



THE A. E. F. 

retical barrages and hurled live bombs into the 
trenches or thereabouts. 

The last set event of the training period was 
a big field meet in which picked companies 
competed in military events. The meet began 
with musketry and worked through bayonets, 
hand grenades, automatic rifles, and machine 
guns, ending with trench digging. It was sup- 
posed that this would be the least exciting, but 
two companies came up to the last event tied 
for the point trophy. Honor and a big silver 
trophy and everything hung on this last event 
and the men could not have worked harder if 
they had been under German shellfire. Par- 
tisans of both sides stood nearby and shouted 
encouragement to their friends and heavy ban- 
ter at the foe. There was organized cheering 
and singing, too, and a couple of bands blared 
while the competitors lay prone and hacked 
away at the tough soil. One band played 
"Won't You Come and Waltz With Me?" 
while the other favored "Sweet Rosie 
O'Grady." Neither seemed particularly per- 
tinent, but there wasn't much sense of the ap- 
propriate in the third band, either, which 

246 



FINISHING TOUCHES 

played "Dearie," while the soldiers were stab- 
bing imitation Boches in the bayonet contest. 

The champions of the pick and shovel 
brushed some of the dirt off their uniforms and 
lined up to receive the prize, which was a big 
silver salad bowl. The best bayoneters got a 
sugar shaker and there were mugs and wrist 
watches and plain watches and all sorts of 
things from the commander and from General 
Sibert and General Castelnau. No sooner 
were the prizes distributed than news came that 
the White Sox had won the first game of the 
world series from the Giants and then there 
was more cheering. The winning company 
went back to camp in a big truck loudly and 
tunefully proclaiming to the natives: "We got 
style, all the while, all the while." 

The Germans contributed one post graduate 
phase of training which was not on the pro- 
gram. Shortl;^ before the troops went to 
the front a Zeppelin was brought down in a 
town within marching distance of the Amer- 
ican training zone. The big balloon could not 
have been better placed if its landing had been 
directed by a Coney Island showman. It was 

247 



THE A. E. F. 

perched on two hills just by the side of a road 
and visitors came from miles about to look at 
the monster. Early comers reaped a rich har- 
vest of souvenirs. "I only had to get three 
more screws loose and I'd have had the steer- 
ing wheel if a French soldier hadn't come up 
and stopped me," complained an American 
correspondent. 

The chasseurs left to go back into the line 
before the Americans started for the front. 
The departure of the chasseurs caused genuine 
regret, for in addition to a profound respect for 
their military ability, the American officers and 
men had a warm personal feeling for the troops 
who taught them the first rudiments of the 
modern art of war. In all the camps there were 
ceremonies for the soldiers who were leaving 
drills and practice attacks and sham battles to 
go back wherever shock troops were needed. 

"When you see us later on some time," said 
an American officer, "we hope to make you 
proud of your pupils." 

Although the French had already given the 
Americans all the fundamentals they would 
need they spent their last few hours in giving 

248 



FINISHING TOUCHES 

them some of the fine points and a minute de- 
scription of just what conditions they might 
expect at the front. 

"When you go up there," said a French of- 
ficer, "the soldiers you come to relieve will say 
that you are late. They will say that they have 
been waiting a long time and they will go out 
very quickly. Always we find when we come 
in that the troops in the trench have been wait- 
ing a long time and always they go out very 
quickly." 

As the sturdy Frenchmen marched away 
their cries of "bonne chance" mingled with 
equally hearty shouts of "good luck." 



CHAPTER XIX 

THE AMERICAN ARMY MARCHES 
TO THE TRENCHES 

The chief press officer told us that we could 
spend the first night in the trenches with the 
American army. There were eight correspon- 
dents and we went jingling up to the front 
with gas masks and steel helmets hung about 
our necks and canned provisions in our pockets. 

It was dusk when we left . Bye-and-bye 

we could hear the guns plainly and the vil- 
lages through which we traveled all showed 
their share of shelling. The front was still a 
few miles ahead of us, but we left the cars in 
the square of a large village and started to 
walk the rest of the way. We got no further 
than just bej^ond the town. An American of- 
ficer stood at the foot of an old sign post which 
gave the distance to Metz, but not the difficul- 
ties. He asked us our destination and when we 
told him that we were going to spend the first 

250 



THE AMERICAN ARMY 

night in the trenches with the American army 
he wouldn't hear of it. 

"There'll be trouble enough up there," he 
said, "without newspapermen." 

He was a nervous man, this major. Every 
now and then he would look at his watch. 
When he looked for the fourth time within two 
minutes he felt that we deserved an explana- 
tion, 

"I'm a little nervous," he said, "because the 
Boches are so quiet tonight. I've been up here 
looking around for almost a week and every 
night the Geraians have done some shelling." 
He looked at his watch again. "The first com- 
pany of my battalion must be going in now." 
He stood and listened for six or seven seconds 
but there wasn't a sound. "I wonder what 
those Germans are up to?" he continued. "I 
don't like it. I wish they'd shoot a little. This 
business now doesn't seem natural." 

We turned back toward the town and left 
the major at his post still listening for some 
sound from up there. Soon we heard a noise, 
but it came from the opposite direction. Sol- 
diers were coming. There was a bend in the 

251 



THE A. E. F. 

road where it straightened out in the last two 
miles to the trenches. It was so dark that we 
could not see the men until they were almost 
up to us. The Americans were marching to the 
front. The French had instructed them and 
the British and now they were ready to learn 
just what the Germans could teach them. 

The night was as thick as the mud. The 
darkness seemed to close behind each line of 
men as they went by. Even the usual march- 
ing rhythm was missing. The mud took care 
of that. The doughboys would have sung if 
they could. Shells wouldn't have been much 
worse than the silence. One soldier did begin 
in a low voice, "Tramp, tramp, tramp, the boys 
are marching." An officer called, "Cut out that 
noise." There was no tramp, tramp, tramp on 
that road. Feet came down squish, squish, 
squish. There was also the sound of the wind. 
That w^asn't very cheerful, either, for it was 
rising and beginning to moan a little. It 
seemed to get hold of the darkness and pile it 
up in drifts against the camouflage screens 
which lined the road. 

At the spot where the road turned there was 
252 



THE AMERICAN ARMY 

a cafe and across the road a military moving 
picture theater. The door of the cafe was open 
and a big patch of light fell across the road. 
The doughboys had to go through the patch of 
light and it was almost impossible not to turn 
a bit and look through the door. There was 
red wine and white to be had for the asking 
there, and persuasion would bring an omelette. 
The waitress was named Marie, but they called 
her Madelon. She was eighteen and had black 
hair with red ribbons. She could talk a little 
English, too, but nobody came to the door of 
the cafe to see the soldiers go by. There had 
been a good many who passed the door of that 
cafe in three years. 

The pictures coifld not be seen from the road, 
but we could hear the hum of the machine 
which made them move. Presently, we went to 
the door and looked. The theater was packed 
with French soldiers who were back from the 
front to rest. American troops were going into 
the trenches for the first time. Our little group 
of civilians had come thousands of miles to see 
this thing, but the poilus did not stop to watch 
marching men. They paid their 10 centimes 

253 



THE A. E. F. 

and went into the picture show. They had an 
American Western fihn that night, and French 
soldiers who only the day before had been face 
to face with Germans, shelled and gassed and 
harassed from aeroplanes, thrilled as Indians 
chased cowboys across a canvas screen. It 
grew more exciting presently, for the United 
States cavalry came riding up across the screen 
and at the head of the cavalcade rode Lieuten- 
ant Wallace Kirke. The villain had spread the 
story that he wasn't game, but there was noth- 
ing to that. The poilus realized that before the 
film was done and so did the Indians. 

Meanwhile the doughboys were marching by 
as silently as the soldiers on the screen, for this 
wasn't a movie-house where they synchronized 
bugle calls and rifle fire to the progress of the 
film. At one point in the story there was some 
gun thunder, but it came at a time when the 
orchestra should have been playing "Hearts 
and Flowers" for the love scene in the garden. 
Of course, these were German guns, and they 
were fired with the usual German disregard for 
art. 

Probably the men who were marching to the 
254 



THE AMERICAN ARMY 

trenches would have enjoyed the scene of the 
home-coming of the cavahy, when Lieutenant 
Wallace Kirke confounded the villain, who 
actually held a commission as major in the 
United States army. However, the dough- 
boys might have spotted him for a villain from 
the beginning, on account of his wretched 
saluting. The director should have spoken to 
him about that. 

The marching men looked at the theater as 
they passed by, but only one soldier spoke. He 
said: "I certainly would like to know for sure 
whether I'll ever get to go to the movies again." 

They went a couple of hundred yards more 
without a word, and then a soldier who couldn't 
stand the silence any longer shouted, 
"Whoopee! Whoopee!" It was too dark to 
conduct an investigation and too close to the 
line to administer any rebuke loud enough to 
be effective, and so the nearest officer just 
glared in the general direction of the offender. 
A little bit further on the soldiers found that 
the road was pock-marked here and there with 
shell holes. They began to realize the impor- 
tance of silence then, for they knew that where 

255 



THE A. E. F. 

a shell had gone once it could go again. It was 
necessary to walk carefully, for the road was 
covered with casual water in every hollow, and 
there was no seeing a hole until you stepped 
in it. They managed, however, to avoid the 
deeper holes and to jump most of the pools. 

That is, the infantry did. Late that night a 
teamster reported that he had driven his four 
mules into a shell hole and broken the rear axle 
of his wagon. 

"Why didn't you send a man out ahead to 
look out for shell holes?" asked the officer. 

"I did," said the soldier. "He fell in first." 

Presently the marching men came to the be- 
ginning of the trench system, and they were 
glad to get a wall on either side of them. There 
was no scramble, however, to be the first man 
in, and even the major of the battalion has for- 
gotten the name of the first soldier to set foot 
in the French trenches. Some twenty or thirty 
men claim the honor, but it will be difficult to 
settle the matter with historical accuracy. A 
Middle Western farm boy, an Irishman with 
red hair or a German- American would seem to 
fit the circumstances best, but it's all a matter 

256 



THE AMERICAN ARMY 

of choice. As the Americans came in the 
French marched out. 

A trench during a relief is no good place for 
a demonstration, but some of the poilus paused 
to shake hands with the Americans. There 
were rumors that one or two doughboys had 
been kissed, but I was unable to substantiate 
these reports. Probably they are not true, for 
it would not be the sort of thing a company 
would forget. 

Although the trenches for the most part were 
far from the German lines, there was noise 
enough to attract attention over the way. The 
Germans did not seem to know what was go- 
ing on, but they wanted to know, and they sent 
up a number of star shells. These are the 
shells which explode to release a bright light 
suspended from a little silk parachute. These 
parachutes hung in the air for several minutes 
and brightly illumined No Man's Land. It 
was impossible to keep the Americans entirely 
quiet then. Some said "Oh!" and others ex- 
claimed "Ah!" after the manner of crowds at 
a fire-works show. 

Persiflage of this kind helped to make the 
257 



THE A. E. F. 

men feel at home. Indeed, the trenches did not 
seem altogether unfamiliar, after all their days 
and nights in the practice trenches back in 
camp. The men were a little nervous, though, 
and took it out in smoking one cigarette after 
another. They shielded the light under their 
trench helmets. After an hour or so a green 
rocket went up and all the soldiers in the 
American trenches put on their gas masks. 
They had been drilled for weeks in getting 
them on fast and a green rocket was the 'signal 
agreed upon as the warning for an attack. 
Presently the word came from the trenches 
that the masks were not necessary. There had 
been no attack. The rocket came from the 
German trenches. It was quiet then all along 
the short trench line with the exception of an 
occasional rifle shot. The wind was making 
a good deal of noise out in the mess of weeds 
just beyond the wire and it sounded like Ger- 
mans to some of the boys. It was clearer now 
and a sharp eyed man could see the stakes of 
the wire. They were a bit ominous, too. 

"I was looking at one of those stakes," a 
doughboy told me, "and I kept alooking and 

258 



THE AMERICAN ARMY 

alooking and all of a sudden it grew a pair of 
shoulders and a helmet and I let go at it." 

There were others who suffered from the 
same optical illusion that night, but let it be 
said to their credit that when a working party 
eJxamined the wire several days later they 
found some stakes which had been riddled 
through and through with bullets. 



CHAPTER XX 

TRENCH LIFE 

They dragged the gun up by hand to fire 
the first shot in the war for the American army. 
The lieutenant in charge of the battery told 
us about it. He was standing on top of the 
gun emplacement and the historic seventy-five 
and a few others were being used every little 
while to fire other shots at the German lines. 
He had to pause, therefore, now and then in 
telling us history to make a little more. 

"I put it up to my men," said the lieutenant, 
"that we would have to wait a little for the 
horses and if we wanted to be sure of firing the 
first shot it would be a good stunt to drag the 
gun into place ourselves. We had a little talk 
and everybody w^as anxious for our battery to 
get in the first shot, so we decided to go through 
with it and not wait for the horses. We 
dragged the gun up at night and I can tell you 
that the last mile and a half took some pulling. 

260 



TRENCH LIFE 

Excuse me a second " He leaned down to 

the pit and began to shout figures. He made 
them quick and snappy like a football signal 
and he looked exactly like a quarterback with 
the tin hat on his head which might have been 
a leather head guard. There was a sort of 
eagerness about him, too, as if the ball was on 
the five-yard line with one minute more to play. 
It was all in his manner. Everything he said 
was professional enough. After the string of 
figures he shouted "watch your bubble" and 
then he went on with the story. 

"We fired the first shot at exactly six twen- 
ty-seven in the morning," he said. "It was a 
shrapnel shell." He turned to the gunners 
again. "Ready to fire," he shouted down to the 
men in the pit. "You needn't put your fingers 
in your ears just yet," he told us. 

"It was pretty foggy when we got up to the 
front and we thought first we'd just have to 
blaze away in the general direction of the Ger- 
mans without any particular observation. But 
all of a sudden the fog lifted and right from 
here we could see a bunch of Germans out fix- 
ing their wire. I gave 'em shrapnel and they 

261 



THE A. E. F. 

scattered back to their dugouts like prairie 
dogs. It was great!" 

The lieutenant smiled at the recollection of 
the adventure. It meant as much to him as a 
sixty-yard run in the Princeton game or a 
touchdown against Yale. He was fortunate 
enough to be still getting a tingle out of the 
war that had nothing to do with the cold wind 
that was coming over No Man's Land. A 
moment later he grinned again and he sud- 
denly called, "Fire," and the roar of the gun 
under our feet came quicker than we could get 
our fingers in our ears. 

The gun had earned a rest now and we went 
down and looked at it. The gunners had 
chalked a name on the carriage and we found 
that this seventy-five which fired the first shot 
against the Germans was called Heinie. We 
wanted to know the name of the man who fired 
the first shot. Our consciences were troubling 
us about that. This was our first day up with 
the guns in the American sector and the men 
had been in two days. There were drawbacks 
in writing the war correspondence from a dis- 
tance as we had been compelled to do up to 

262 



TRENCH LIFE 

this time. We'd heard, of course, that the first 
gun had been fired and that made it impera- 
tive that the story should be "reconstructed," 
as the modern newspaperman says when he's 
writing about something which he didn't see. 
Of course, everybody back home would want to 
know who fired the first shot. Censorship pre- 
vented the use of the name, but we couldn't 
blame the censors for that, because when we 
wrote the stories we didn't know his name or 
anything about him. With just one dissent- 
ing vote the correspondents decided that the 
man who fired the first shot must have been a 
red-headed Irishman. And so it was cabled. 
Now we wanted to know whether he was. 

The lieutenant told us the name, but that 
didn't settle the question. It was a more or 
less non-committal name and the officer volun- 
teered to find out for us. He led the party 
over to the mouth of another dugout and called 
down: "Sergeant , there's some news- 
papermen here and they want to know whether 
you're Irish." 

Immediately there was a scrambling noise 
263 



THE A. E. F. 

down in the dugout and up came the gunner on 
the run. "I am not," he said. 

"Haven't you got an Irish father or mother 
or aren't any of your people Irish?" asked one 
of the correspondents hopefully. He was com- 
mitted to the red-headed story and he was not 
prepared to give up yet. "Not one of 'em," 
said the sergeant, "I haven't got a drop of Irish 
blood in me. I come from South Bend, In- 
diana." 

The party left the gunner rather discon- 
solately. That is, all but the hopeful corre- 
spondent. "He's Irish, all right," he said. 
We turned on the optimist. 

"Didn't you hear him say he wasn't Irish?" 
we shouted. 

"Oh, that's all right," answered the optimist, 
"you didn't expect he was going to admit it. 
They never do." 

"Say," inquired another reporter, "did any- 
body notice what was the color of the sergeant's 
hair?" 

I had, but I said nothing. There had been 
disillusion enough for one day. It was black 
with a little gray around the temples. 

264 



TRENCH LIFE 

The lieutenant took us to his dugout and we 
tried to get some copy out of him. A man from 
an evening newspaper spoiled our chances 
right away. 

"I suppose," he said, "that you made a little 
speech to the men before they fired that first 
shot?" 

The little lieutenant was professional in an 
instant. He felt a sudden fear that his man- 
ner or his youth had led us to picture him as a 
romantic figure. 

*'What would I make a speech for?" he in- 
quired coldly. 

"Well," said the reporter, "I should think 
you'd want to say something. You were go- 
ing to fire the first shot of the war, and more 
than that, you were going to fire the first shot 
in anger which the American army has ever 
fired in Europe. Of course, I didn't mean a 
speech exactly, but you must have said some- 
thing." 

"No," answered the officer, "I just gave 'em 
the range and then I said 'ready to fire' and 
then, 'fire.' It was just like this afternoon. 
We made it perfectly regular." 

265 



THE A. E. F. 

"In the army a thing like that's just part of 
the day's work," the lieutenant added, with an 
attempted assumption of great sophistication 
in regard to war matters, as if this was at least 
his twentieth campaign. 

And yet I think that if we had heard our lit- 
tle quarterback give his order at six twenty- 
seven on that misty morning there would have 
been something in his voice when he said "fire" 
which would have betrayed him to us. I think 
it must have been a little sharper, a little faster 
and a little louder for this first shot than it 
will be when he calls "fire" for the thousand- 
and-tenth round. 

The guns had decided to call it a day by this 
time and so we headed for the trenches. We 
had to travel across a big bare stretch of coun- 
try which was wind-swept and rain-soaked on 
this particular afternoon. Every now and then 
somebody fell into a shell hole, for the meadow 
was well slashed up, although there didn't seem 
to be anything much to shoot at. On the whole, 
the sector chosen for the first Americans in the 
trenches might well be called a quiet front. 
There was shelling back and forth each day, 

266 



TRENCH LIFE 

but many places were immune. Some villages 
just back of the French lines had not been 
fired at for almost a year, although they were 
within easy range of field pieces, and the 
French in return didn't fire at villages in the 
German lines. This was by tacit agreement. 
Both sides had held the lines in this part of the 
country lightly and both sides were content to 
sit tight and not stir up trouble. 

Things livened up after the Americans came 
in because the Germans soon found out that 
new troops were opposing them and they 
wanted to identify the units. Some of the in- 
creasing liveliness was also due to the fact that 
American gunners were anxious to get prac- 
tice and fired much more than the French had 
done. Indeed, an American officer earned a 
rebuke from his superiors because he fired into 
a German village which had been hitherto im- 
mune. This was a mistake, for the Germans 
immediately retaliated by shelling a French 
village and the civilian population was forced 
to move out. For more than a year they had 
lived close to the battle lines in comparative 
safety. On the night the American troops 

267 



THE A. E. F. 

moved in to the trenches a baby was born in a 
village less than a mile from one of our bat- 
talion headquarters. Major General Sibert 
became her godfather and the child was chris- 
tened Unis in honor of Les Etats Unis. 

The increase in artillery activity had hardly 
begun on the day we paid our visit. No Ger- 
man shells fell near us as we crossed the 
meadow, but when we reached a battalion 
headquarters the major in charge pointed with 
pride to a German shell which had landed on 
top of his kitchen that morning. The rain had 
played him a good service, for the shell simply 
buried itself, fragments and all. He did not 
seem properly appreciative of the weather. 
"All Gaul," he said, "is divided into three parts 
and two of them are water." 

Still, we found ourselves drier in the trenches 
than out of them. They were floored with 
boards and well lined. As trenches go they 
were good, but, of course, that isn't saying a 
great deal. We were the first newspapermen 
to enter the American trenches and so we 
wanted to see the first line, although it was 
growing dark. We wound around and around 

268 



TRENCH LIFE 

for many yards and it was hard walking for 
some of us, as the French had built these 
trenches for short men. It was necessary to 
walk with a crouch like an Indian on the movie 
warpath. This was according to instructions, 
but we may have been unduly cautious, for not 
a hostile shot was fired while we were in the 
first line. It was barely possible to see the 
German trenches through the mist and still 
more difficult to realize that there was a men- 
ace in the untidy welts of mud which lay at the 
other side of the meadow. But the point from 
which we looked across to the German line was 
the very salient where the Germans made their 
first raid a week later and captured twelve men, 
killed three, and wounded five. 

The doughboys wouldn't let us go without 
pointing out all the sights. To the right was 
the apple tree. Here the Germans used to 
come on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays 
and the French on Tuesdays, Thursdays and 
Saturdays, and gather fruit without molesta- 
tion so long as not more than two came at a 
time. This was another tacit agreement in this 
quiet front, for the tree was in easy rifle range. 

269 



THE A. E. F. 

One of the doughboys unwittingly broke that 
custom by taking a shot at two Germans who 
went to get apples. 

"I like apples myself," he said, "and I just 
couldn't lie still and watch a squarehead carry 
them away by the armful." 

The Hindenburg Rathskeller lay to the left 
of our trench, but it was only dimly visible 
through the rain. This battered building was 
once a tiny roadside cafe. Now patrols take 
shelter behind its walls at night and try to find 
cheer in the room where only a few broken 
bottles remain. The poilus maintain that on 
dark nights the ghosts of cognac, of burgundy 
and even champagne flit about in and out of 
the broken windows and that a lucky soldier 
may sometimes detect, by an inner warmth and 
tingle, the ghost of some drink that is gone. 
Sometimes it is a German patrol which spends 
the night in No Man's Cafe. It is more or less 
a custom to allow whichever side gets to the 
cafe first to hold it for the night, since it is a 
strong defensive position in the dark. The 
night before our visit an American patrol 
reached the cafe and found that the Germans 

270 



TRENCH LIFE 

who had been there the night before had placed 
above the shattered door of the little inn a 
sign which read: "Hindenburg Rathskeller." 
Silently but swiftly one of the doughboys 
scratched out the name with a pencil and left 
a sign of his own. When next the Germans 
came they found that Hindenburg's Rathskel- 
ler had become the Baltimore Dairy Lunch. 

Several hundred yards behind the Baltimore 
Dairy Lunch is another ruined house and it 
was here that the Americans killed their first 
German. Even on clear days Germans in 
groups of not more than two would sometimes 
come from their trenches to the house. The 
French thought that they had a machine gun 
there, but it was not worth while to waste 
shells on parties of one or two and as the range 
was almost 1700 yards the Germans felt com- 
paratively iromune from rifle fire. Two dough- 
boys saw a German walking along the road 
one bright morning and as they had telescopic 
sights on their rifles they were anxious to try 
a shot. One of the men was a sergeant and 
the other a corporal. 

"That's my German," said the sergeant. 
271 



THE A. E. F. 

"I saw him first," objected the corporal, and 
so they agreed to count five and then fire to- 
gether. One or both of them hit him, for down 
he came. 

When we got back to the second line the men 
were having supper. The food supplied to the 
soldiers in the trenches was hot and adequate 
and moderately abundant. A few of the men 
complained that they got only two meals a 
day, but I found that there was an early ration 
of coffee and bread which these soldiers did not 
count as enough of a breakfast to be mentioned 
as a meal. This comes at dawn and then there 
are meals at about eleven and five. One of the 
men with whom I talked was mournful. 

*'We don't get anything much but slum," 
he said, when I asked him, "How's the food?" 
That did not sound appetizing until I found 
out that slum was a stew made of beef and 
potatoes and carrots and lots of onions. We 
ate some and it was very good, but perhaps it 
does pall a little after the third or fourth day. 
It forms the main staple of army diet in the 
trenches, for it is not possible to give the men 
in the line any great variety of food. The most 

272 



TRENCH LIFE 

tragic story in connection with food which we 
heard concerned a company which was just 
beginning dinner when a gas alarm was 
sounded. The men had been carefully trained 
to drop everything and adjust their masks 
when this alarm was sounded. So down went 
their mess tins, spilling slum on the trench floor 
as the masks were quickly fastened. Five min- 
utes later word came that the gas alarm was a 
mistake. 

Before we left we saw a patrol start out. 
The doughboys took to patrolling eagerly and 
officers who asked for volunteers were always 
swamped with requests from men who wanted 
to go. One lieutenant was surprised to have 
a large fat cook come to him to say that he 
would not be happy unless allowed to make a 
trip across No Man's Land to the German 
wire. When the officer asked him why he was 
so anxious to go, he said: "Well, you see, I 
promised to get a German helmet and an over- 
coat for a girl for Christmas and I haven't got 
much time left." 

It was dark when we left the trenches and 
started cross country. The German guns had 

273 



THE A. E. F. 

begun to fire a little. They were spasmodically 
shelling a clump of woods half a mile away and 
seemed indifferent to correspondents. But by 
this time the weather was actively hostile. The 
rain had changed to snow and the wind had 
risen to a gale. Every shell hole had become 
a trap to catch the unwary and wet him to the 
waist. Little brooks were carrying on like 
rivers and amateur lakes were everywhere. 
We walked and walked and suddenly the 
French lieutenant who was guiding us paused 
and explained that he hadn't the least idea 
where we were. Nothing could be seen through 
the driving snow and there was no certainty 
that we hadn't turned completely around. We 
wondered if there were any gaps in the wire 
and if it would be possible to walk into the 
German lines by mistake. We also wondered 
whether the Kaiser's three hundred marks for 
the first American would stand if the pris- 
oner was only a reporter. Just then there was 
a sudden sharp rift in the mist ahead of us. A 
big flash cut through the snow and fog and 
after a second we heard a bang behind us. 
"Those are American guns," said our guide, 
274 



TRENCH LIFE 

and we made for them. We were lost again 
once or twice, but each time we just stood and 
waited for the flash from the battery until we 
reached our base. Shortly after we arrived 
the shelling ceased. There was hardly a war- 
like sound. It was a quiet night on a tran- 
quil front. The weather was too bad even for 
fighting. 

We went to the hospital in the little town 
and were allowed to look at the first German 
prisoner. He was a pretty sick boy when we 
saw him. He gave his age when examined as 
nineteen, but he looked younger and not very 
dangerous, for he was just coming out of the 
ether. The American doctors were giving him 
the best of care. He had a room to himself and 
his own nurse. The doughboys had captured 
him close to the American wire. There had 
been great rivalry as to which company would 
get the first prisoner, but he came almost un- 
sought. The patrol was back to its own wire 
when the soldiers heard the noise of somebody 
moving about to the left. He was making no 
effort to walk quietly. As he came over a little 
hillock his outline could be seen for a second 

275 



THE A. E. F. 

and one of the Americans called out to him to 
halt. He turned and started to run, but a 
doughboy fired and hit him in the leg and an- 
other soldier's bullet came through his back. 
The patrol carried the prisoner to the trench. 
He seemed much more dazed by surprise than 
by the pain of his wounds. "You're not 
French," he said several times as the curious 
Americans gathered about him in a close, dim 
circle illuminated by pocket flash lamps. The 
prisoner next guessed that they were English 
and when the soldiers told him that they were 
Americans he said that he and his comrades 
did not know that Americans were in the line 
opposite them. Somebody gave him a cigar- 
ette and he grew more chipper in spite of his 
wounds. He began to talk, saying: "Ich bin 
ein esel." 

There were several Americans who had 
enough German for that and they asked him 
why. The prisoner explained that he had been 
assigned to deliver letters to the soldiers. Some 
of the letters were for men in a distant trench 
which slanted toward the French line, and so 
to save time he had taken a short cut through 

276 



TRENCH LIFE 

No Man's Land. It was a dark night but he 
thought he knew the way. He kept bearing 
to the left. Now, he said, he knew he should 
have turned to the right. He said it would 
be a lesson to him. The next morning we 
heard that the German had died and would be 
buried with full military honors. 

There was another patient whom we were 
interested in seeing. Lieutenant Devere H. 
Harden was the first American officer wounded 
in the war. His wound was not a very bad 
one and the doctors allowed us to crowd about 
his bed and ask questions. In spite of the 
British saying, "y^^ never hear a shell that hits 
you," Harden said he both saw and heard his 
particular shell. He thought it would have 
scored a direct hit on his head if he had not fal- 
len flat. As it was the projectile exploded al- 
most fifty feet away from him and his wound 
was caused by a fragment which flew back and 
lodged behind his knee. He did not know that 
he had been hit, but sought shelter in a dug- 
out. Just as he got to the door he felt a pain 
in his knee and fell over. He noticed then that 
his leg was bleeding a little. A French of- 

277 



THE A. E. F. 

ficer ran over to him and said: '*You are a very 
lucky man." 

"How is that?" asked Harden. 

**Why, you're the first American to be 
wounded and I'm going to recommend to the 
general that he put up a tablet right here with 
your name on it and the date and *first Amer- 
ican to shed his blood for France.' " 

The thought of the tablet didn't cheer the 
lieutenant up half so much as when we pre- 
vailed on the doctors to let him take some 
cigarettes from us and begin smoking again. 
By this time we had almost forgotten about 
the slum of earlier in the evening and so we 
stopped at the first cafe we came to on the 
road back to the correspondents' headquar- 
ters. Several American soldiers were sitting 
around a small stove in the kitchen, and al- 
though they said nothing, an old woman was 
cooking omelettes and small steaks and dis- 
tributing them about to the rightful owners 
without the slightest mistake. At least there 
were no complaints. Perhaps the doughboys 
were afraid of the old woman for whenever one 
of them got in her way she would say nothing 

278 



TRENCH LIFE 

but push him violently in the chest with both 
j hands. He would then step back and the cook- 
ing would go on. 

Presently a noisy soldier came roaring into 
: the kitchen. It took him just half a minute 
to get acquainted and about that much more 
time to tell us that he was driving a four mule 
team with rations. We asked him if he had 
gotten near the front and he snorted scorn- 
fully. He told us that the night before he 
had almost driven into the German lines. Ac- 
cording to his story, he lost his way in the 
dark and drove past the third line trench, the 
second line and the first line and started rum- 
bling along an old road which cut straight 
across No Man's Land and into the German 
lines. 

"I was going along," he said, "and a dough- 
boy out in a listening post, I guess it must 
have been, jumped up and waved both his 
hands at me to go back. 'What's the matter?' 
I asked him, just natural, like I'm talking to 
you, and he just mumbles at me. * You're go- 
ing right toward the German lines,' he says. 

279 



THE A. E. F. 

Tor God's sake turn round and go back and 
don't speak above a whisper.' 

"* Whisper, Hell!' I says to him, kind of 
mad, *I gotta turn four mules around.' " 



CHAPTER XXI 

THE VETERANS RETURN 

When the first contingent of doughboys 
came out of the trenches I went to a French 
officer whom I knew well and asked him what 
he thought of the Americans. 

^'Remember," I told him, "I don't want you 
to dress up an opinion for me. Tell me what 
you really thought of our men when you saw 
them up there. What did the French say 
about them?" 

"Truly, I think they are very good," the 
Frenchman told me. Then he corrected him- 
self. "I mean I think they will be very good. 
They are something like the Canadians. They 
were pretty jumpy at first, but that doesn't do 
any harm. The soldiers up there, they wanted 
to fire when the grass was moving and they did 
sometimes, without getting any orders. They 
got over that pretty soon. By the third night 

281 



THE A. E. F. 

they were pretty well settled. Of course, they 
can shoot better than our men and they are 
bigger and stronger, but in some things we 
have the advantage. You Americans are much 
more excitable than we French." 

As a rule French and British officers were 
inclined to be optimistic about the Americans. 
The}^ were impressed by their physique. The 
first of the Canadians were probably a little 
huskier than the Americans and the early con- 
tingents of Australians and New^ Zealanders 
were at least as good, but now all the rest are 
falling off in their physical standards on ac- 
count of losses, while the most recent Amer- 
ican arrivals in France are better than any of 
our earlier contingents. 

The American is potentially a good soldier, 
but it is a long cry of preeminence. Any na- 
tion which establishes itself as the best in the 
field will have to perform marvelous deeds. 
The chances are that nobody will touch the 
high water mark of the French. After all, in 
her finest moments, France has a positive 
genius for warfare. Her best troops possess 
a combination of patience in defense and dash 

282 



THE VETERANS RETURN 

in attack. France has a fighting tradition 
which we do not possess. We must gain that 
before we can rival her. 

From the point of view of the newspaper- 
man the Frenchman is the ideal soldier of the 
world. Not only can he fight, but he can tell 
you about it. There is no trouble in getting 
a poilu to talk. He has opinions on every sub- 
ject under the sun. The only difficulty is in 
understanding him once you have got him 
started. The doughboys, on the other hand, 
are usually reticent. They're always afraid of 
being detected in some sentimental or heroic 
pose and so they adopt a belittling attitude to- 
ward anything which happens as protection. 
The first men who came back from the trenches 
were not quite like that. These doughboys 
were more like Rossetti's angels. "The won- 
der was not yet quite gone from that still look" 
of theirs. 

They did not minimize their experiences. I 
think I understand now what Secretary Baker 
meant when he said that some of the most 
thrilling stories of the war would come in let- 
ters from the soldiers. We went to the major 

283 



THE A. E. F. 

of a battalion which had just come back from 
the front to its billets. 

"No, nothing much happened while we were 
up there," he said. *'They didn't shell us very 
hard; they didn't try any raids or any gas and 
the aeroplanes let us alone." 

Then we tried the soldiers. "Yes, sir, we 
certainly did see some aeroplanes," said a 
doughboy. "Why, one day there was two 
hundred and twenty-five flew over my head. 
I think the French brought down twenty of 
them, but I didn't see that." Another told 
how two hundred and fifty Germans had 
started to attack the Americans. "Our ar- 
tillery put a barrage on them and in a couple 
of minutes all l)ut three of them were dead." 

"Did you see those Germans yourself?" we 
asked him sternly. 

"No," he admitted, "it was a little bit down 
to our left but I heard about it." 

There were other stories which may have 
grown in the telling, but they sounded more 
plausible. One concerned a soldier who had 
his hyphen shot away at the front. This man 
was of German parentage and his father was 

284 



THE VETERANS RETURN 

in the German army. Before he went to the 
trenches he used to dwell on what a terrible 
thing it was for him to be fighting against his 
father and Fatherland. He declared that if it 
were possible he was going to play a passive 
part in the war. But in the course of time he 
went into the first line and no sooner was he 
in than he peeked over the top to have a look 
at the folks from the old home. *'Pat, pat, 
pat!" a stream of bullets from a machine gun 
went by his head. The German-American 
gave a grunt of surprise and then a yell of rage 
and jumped over the parapet and began firing 
his rifle in the direction of the machine gun. 
He must have made a lucky hit for by some 
chance or other the machine gun ceased fir- 
ing and the doughboy crawled back into the 
trench unharmed. He was still mad and kept 
mumbling, "I didn't do anything but look at 
'em and they went and shot at me." 

A story better authenticated concerns a 
visit which General Pershing paid to the 
trenches. A young captain took his responsi- 
bilities much to heart and wanted to leave 
nothing to his subordinates. He was on the 

285 



THE A. E. F. 

rush constantly from one point to another and 
at the end of fifty-two hours of unceasing toil 
he went to his dugout to get three hours' sleep. 
He had hardly started to snore when there 
was a knock and a doughboy came in to com- 
plain that he had sore feet and what should he 
do. A few minutes later it was another who 
wanted to know where he could get additional 
candles. Rid of him, the captain really be- 
gan to sleep, only to be awakened by a knock 
at the door and a voice, "Is this the company 
commander?" 

"Yes," said the irritated captain, "and what 
the hell do you want?" 

The door opened and the strictest disci- 
plinarian in the American army permitted 
himself the shadow of a smile. "I'm General 
Pershing," he said. 

One battalion came back from the front with 
an additional member. He was a large dog 
of uncertain breed who had deserted from the 
German lines. At least it was hard to say 
whether he belonged to the German army or 
the French. The French first saw him one 
afternoon when he came lumbering across No 

286 



THE VETERANS RETURN 

Man's Land and pushed himself through the 
wn^e in a place where it had grown a bit slack. 
One French soldier fired at him. The poilu 
thought it might be a new trick of the Ger- 
mans. For all he knew a couple of Boches 
might have been concealed inside the big 
hound. He was no marksman, this soldier, 
for he missed the dog who promptly turned 
sharply to the left and came in at another 
point in the trenches. The soldiers made him 
welcome although there was some discussion 
as to what his nationality might be. It was 
evident that he had come across from the Ger- 
man lines, but it was possible that he was a 
French dog captured in one of the villages 
which fell to the invaders. The men in the 
front line tried him with all the German they 
knew — "You German pig," "what's your 
regiment?" "damn the Kaiser," "to Berlin," 
and a few others. He indicated no under- 
standing of the phrases. Later he was taken 
further back and examined at length by an 
intelligence officer but no single German word 
could be found which he seemed to recognize. 
On the other hand it was ascertained that he 

287 



THE A. E. F. 

was equally ignorant of French. However, 
he understood signs, would bark for a bone 
and never missed an invitation to eat. 

During the first week of his stay the sol- 
diers were generous in giving him a share of 
their rations. Later he became an old friend 
and did not fare so well. One night he dis- 
appeared and an outpost saw him lumbering 
back to the German lines. The Boches were 
out on patrol that night and apparently the 
big dog reached their lines without being fired 
upon. He was gone three weeks and then he 
returned for a long stay with the French. So 
it went on. He never affiliated himself per- 
manently with either army and he never gave 
away secrets. Possibly his coming gave some 
sign of declining morale across the way for 
when the men became cross and testy the big 
dbg simply changed sides. There was never 
any indication that he had been underfed even 
when rumors were strongest about the food 
shortage in Germany. The Boches took a 
pride in belying these stories, as best they 
could, by keeping the hound sleek and fat. 

The French called him Quatre Cent Vingt 
288 



I 



THE VETERANS RETURN 

after the big gun but nobody knew for cer- 
tain his German alias. Once when he left the 
German lines in broad daylight the Boches all 
along the line were heard whistling for him 
to come back, but no one called him by name. 
The French chose to believe that across the 
way he was known as "Kamerad," but there 
was no evidence on this point. It is true that 
he would stand on his hind legs and wave his 
paws when anybody said "Kamerad," but this 
was a trick and took teaching. 

He must have heard somehow or other 
about the coming of the Americans for he left 
the Germans at noon one day when the dough- 
boys had hardly become settled in their new 
home. A French interpreter vouched for him 
and he was allowed free access to third line, 
second line, first line and, what he valued 
much more, to the company kitchen. Here 
for the first time he tasted slum. Soldiers 
are fond of belittling this combination of beef, 
onions, potatoes and carrots but Quatre Cent 
Vingt was frank in his admiration of the dish. 
Naturally, free-born American citizens could 
not be expected to know him by his outlandish 

289 



THE A. E. F. 

French name or any abbreviation of it and he 
became Big Ed in honor of the mess sergeant. 
Hitherto Quatre Cent Vingt had been careful 
to show no favors. He had been the com- 
pany's dog but he became so distinctly partial 
to the mess sergeant that the soldier took him 
over as his own and when the company went 
away Quatre Cent Vingt went too, following 
closely behind a rolling kitchen. 

The experience in the trenches made iVmer- 
ican soldiers a little more expressive than they 
had been before but the national character re- 
mained baffling. As a nation we unquestion- 
ably have personality but our army is some- 
what lacking in this quality even among its 
leaders. Pershing is a personality, of course, 
and Bullard and Sibert and March, but for the 
rest all major generals seemed much alike to 
us. Sibert we remembered because he was a 
quiet, kindly man who got the things he wanted 
without much fuss. He was among the think- 
ers of the army. Mostly he was listening to 
other people, but when he talked he wasted no 
words. Undoubtedly he was one of the best 
loved men in the army for he combined with 

290 



THE VETERANS RETURN 

his efficiency and his kindhness an occasional 
playful flash of humor. I remember a visit 
which three American newspaperwomen paid 
to him one day at his headquarters. The con- 
versation had scarcely begun when one of the 
women somewhat tactlessly remarked, * 'Gen- 
eral, this is a young man's war, isn't it?" 

General Sibert is husky enough but he is a 
bit gray and he smiled quizzically as he looked 
at his questioner over the top of a big pair of 
horn-rimmed glasses. 

"When I was a cadet at West Point," said 
General Sibert, "I used to console myself with 
the thought that Napoleon was winning bat- 
tles when he was thirty. Now, I find that my 
mind dwells more on the fact that Hindenburg 
is seventy." 

Robert H. Bullard is probably the most pic- 
turesque figure in the American army. He 
has a reputation as a fighter and a daredevil 
and he is still one of the best polo players and 
broadsword experts in the American army. 
They say that when a second lieutenant swore 
at him one day in the heat of a game he made 
no complaint but laid for the young man later 

291 



THE A. E. F. 

on and sent him sprawling off his horse in a 
wild scrimmage. He will fight broadsword 
duels with anybody regardless of rank if his 
opponent promises to be a man who can test 
his mettle. And yet it was a bit surprising 
that when the command of one of the crack 
divisions in France was open, General Persh- 
ing chose BuUard for the command because 
Major General Robert H. Bullard is perhaps 
the worst dressed major general in the Amer- 
ican army. A poilu in one of the provincial 
cities mistook him for an American enlisted 
man and talked to him with great freedom for 
more than half an hour before an excited 
French officer rushed up and told him that the 
man with whom he was talking so familiarly 
was an American general. 

"Oh, that's all right," said Bullard, "I 
wanted to hear what he had to say. Come 
around to my headquarters sometime and tell 
me some more." 

On another occasion I saw an American 
captain suffer acutely because Bullard ap- 
peared at a public Franco- American function 
with two days' growth of beard. "What kind 

292 



THE VETERANS RETURN 

of an aide can he have," moaned the captain. 
"I was on his staff for two years and I never 
let him come out like that. I always had him 
fixed up when there was anything important 
on." 

Tall, spare, hawk- featured and straight, 
Bullard represents a type of officer who has a 
large part to play in the American army. It 
is around such men that tradition grows and 
tradition is the marrow of an army. It was 
Bullard, too, who gave the best expression to 
the hope and purpose of the American army 
which I heard in France. He had said that 
what the American army must always main- 
tain as its most important asset was the of- 
fensive spirit and when we asked him just what 
that was he lapsed into a story which was al- 
ways his favorite device for exposition. 

"There was once a Spanish farmer," said 
General Bullard, "who lived in a small house 
in the country with his pious wife. One day 
he came rushing out of the house with a valise 
in his hand and his good wife stopped him and 
asked, * Where are you going?' *I'm going to 
Seville,' said the farmer bustling right past 

293 



THE A. E. F. 

her. 'You mean God willing,' suggested his 
pious wife. 'No,' replied the farmer, 'I just 
mean that I'm going.' 

"The Lord was angered by this impiety and 
He promptly changed the farmer into a frog. 
His wife could tell that it was her husband all 
right because he was bigger than any of the 
other frogs and more noisy. She went to the 
edge of the pond every day and prayed that 
her husband might be forgiven. And one 
morning — it was the first day of the second 
year — the big frog suddenly began to swell 
and get bigger and bigger until he wasn't a 
frog any more, but a man. And he hopped 
out of the pond and stood on the bank beside 
his wife. Without stopping to kiss her or 
thank her or anything he ran straight into the 
house and came out with a valise in his hand. 

" 'Where are you going?' his wife asked in 
terror. 

" 'To Seville,' he said. 

"She wrung her hands. 'You mean God 
willing,' she cried. 

" 'No,' thundered the farmer, 'to Seville or 
back to the frog pond!' " 

294 



THE VETERANS RETURN 

In the main, however, American ofBcers and 
soldiers were not very successful in express- 
ing their feelings and ideals in regard to the 
war. One of the Y. M. C. A. huts carried on 
an anonymous symposium on the subject 
"Why I joined the army." Only a few of the 
answers came from the heart. Most of the 
rest were of two types. One sort was swank- 
ing and swaggering, in which the writer un- 
consciously melodramatized himself, and the 
other was cynical, in which the writer betrayed 
the fact that he was afraid of being melodra- 
matic. Thus there was one man who an- 
swered, "To fight for my country, the good 
old United States, the land of the free and 
the starry flag that I love so well." "Because 
I was crazy," wrote another and it is prob- 
able that neither reason really represented the 
exact feeling of the man in question. 

Some were distinctly utilitarian such as that 
of the soldier who wrote "To improve my mind 
by visiting the famous churches and art gal- 
leries of the old world." There was also a 
simplicity and directness in "to put Maiden 
on the map." But the two which seemed to 

295 



THE A. E. F. 

be the truest of all were, "Because they said 
I wasn't game and I am too" and "Because 
she'll be sorry when she sees my name in the 
list of the fellows that got killed." 

For a time I was all muddled up about the 
American reaction to the war. Sometimes we 
seemed helplessly provincial and then along 
would come some glorious unhelpless assertive- 
ness. This would probably be in something 
to do with plumbing or doctoring. Even our 
friends in Europe are inclined to put us down 
as materialists. They think we love money 
more than anything else in the world. I don't 
believe this is true. I think we use money 
only as a symbol and that even if we don't ex- 
press them, or if we express them badly, the 
American who fights has not forgotten to pack 
his ideals. A young American officer brought 
that home to me one day in Paris. He was a 
doctor from a thriving factory town upstate. 

"You know," he began, "this war is costing 
me thousands of dollars. I was getting along 
great back home. A lot of factories had me 
for their doctor. My practice was worth 
$15,000 a year. It was all paid up, too, you 

296 



THE VETERANS RETURN 

know, workman's compensation stuff. I'll 
bet it won't be worth a nickel when I get 

back." 

He sat and drummed on the table and 
looked out on the street and a couple of Por- 
tuguese went by in their slate gray uniforms 
and then some Russians, with their marvelous 
tunics, which Bakst might have designed; 
there were French aviators in black and red, 
and rollicking Australians, an Italian, look- 
ing glum, and a Roumanian with a girl on his 

arm. "-i 

"Did you ever read *Ivanhoe'?" said the man > 
with the $15,000 prax^tice, fiercely and sud- 
denly. 

I nodded. 

"Well," he said, "when I was a boy I read 

that book five tunes. I thought it was the 

greatest book in the world, and I guess it is, 

and all this reminds me of Ivanhoe.' " 

"Of *Ivanhoe'?" I said. 

"Yes, you know, all this," and he made an 

expansive gesture, "Verdun, and Joffre, and 

*they shall not pass,' and Napoleon's tomb, 

and war bread, and all the men with medals 

297 



THE A. E. F. 

and everything. Great stuff! There'll never 
be anything like it in the world again. I tell 
you it's better than 'Ivanhoe.' Everything's 
happening and I'm in it. I'm in a little of 
it, anyway. And if I have a chance to get in 
something big I don't care what happens. No, 
sir, if I could just help to give the old Boche 
a good wallop I wouldn't care if I never got 

back. Why, I wouldn't miss this for " 

His eyes were sparkling with excitement now 
and he was straining for adequate expression. 
He brought his fist down on the table until 
the glasses rattled. "I wouldn't miss this for 
$50,000 cash," he said. 



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With an introduction by Willla.m Roscoe Thayee 

To prove conclusively the identity of the aggressors in the 
great war, and their ultimate aims this book has been pre- 
pared from the official docurhents, speeches, letters and 
hundreds of unofficial statements of German leaders. With 
few exceptions, the extracts included in this collection are 
taken directly from the German. 

"It is the most comprehensive collection of this character 
that has yet appeared." — The Springfield Union. 

$1.00 net 

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IHESB ABE APPLETON BOOKS 

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